Good Friday 2021

Until they can identify Christ with re-Crucified Black bodies hanging from a lynching tree there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America and no delivery from the brutal legacy of slavery. 

James Cone

 

CURRENT LIFE in the form of the trial of the police officer who murdered George Floyd, the terrible, repeated accounts and documents of the actual event during Holy Week, leading to today's memorial of the Crucifixion of Jesus proves the point that the great Black liberation theologian James Cone made in his late life sermon The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone pointed out that the acts of crucifixion in subsequent years, often by those who professed a belief in the divinity of Jesus, especially of those whose theological understanding of the Crucifixion of Jesus was at the center of their religious thinking was a scandal and an outrage, those who failed to understand the use of murder, extrajudicial or, I'd say, by the state and its most intimate relationship to what is presented as the judicial murder of Jesus by the Roman state and the Temple leadership who acted, according to John, especially, out of fear of mass lynching of Jews by Rome due to a revolt provoked by the radicalism of Jesus. It being the gangster-empire of Rome that did it, it was the profound economic justice of Jesus that was at the heart of it. If Rome didn't use the terror-execution of mass crucifixion to impose its "Pax Romana" on those people it conquered and colonized it wouldn't have held any of them just as the slave power used violence and terror to keep Black People enslaved, as the United States government used the same to conquer the American territory. To pretend that any Christian churches who supported that violence and terror for those purposes were AND ARE not analogues to the Temple priesthood in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion though not having to worry about the dangers to their followers in the case of white American religious bureaucrats is also important to call out. 

 

Those who witnessed the official murder of George Floyd are the Women who stayed witness to the Crucifixion of Jesus, the ones who feel haunted by their inability to intervene for fear of being killed as well, no doubt, had their counterparts at the Crucifixion of Jesus, though the Gospels don't mention them. The powerlessness of those who knew the injustice of both in the face of the power of the agents of the legal and economic power are real too. If any of our government, our legal system escape from further guilt in the lynching of George Floyd, if they break out of the pattern is yet to be seen in that one case, it certainly has not often done so in other Crucifixions by the American empire.  

George Floyd is Jesus in a story of the Crucifixion as it should be told this year, his killer is the Pilate-Temple leadership and Roman soldier doing the actual torturing and murdering on behalf of the ones behind the act. Roman soldiers might have murdered innocent Jews but they wouldn't have crucified them unless they were acting on behalf of those with power over them. Neither did the killers of George Floyd. And you can say the same about a long, long list of People murdered in similar ways, even as they were simply living their lives, EVEN SOMETIMES IN THEIR OWN HOMES. That's my Good Friday meditation this year and, I am certain after hearing James Cone's sermon, from now on.