Good Friday?
Today marks Good Friday, a day in the Christian calendar when we remember that Jesus died.
Today reminds me of the times that I have seen the cross in churches and forgotten that Jesus’ body once hung upon it. I mistakenly see the cross as a shape— rather than a physical marking of death, an execution by the people. “The cross places God in the midst of people who are hung shot, burned and tortured,” writes James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
While a reminder of Jesus’ brutal death, the cross also represents mystery, hope, and forgiveness, the suffering that Jesus bore for the sake of the world. But today, I remember that I am among the members of the crowd shouting, “Crucify him!”
In a week when students flooded the streets to protest the state’s worship of guns, and two unarmed Black men were shot dead by police, it is not difficult to connect how Jesus’ suffering is relevant today.
Stephon Clark was shot by police in his own backyard. The 22-year-old father of two was shot multiple times. The policeman thought he had a weapon when he carried a cell phone. Protests have been continuous in Sacramento ever since.
“This is horrific, this is violence, and all mothers need to get up and stand for peace and love because our children should not be dying like this,” his mother, Cecile Thompson said.
The stories of crucified peoples in history have gripped my understanding of the cross since I first went to El Salvador, and saw the passion of Christ illustrated with Salvadoran people’s bodies. The blessed Archbishop Oscar Romero said on March 24, 1978:
While we look at Christ nailed to the cross, he invites us to discern from the sacred word a real mystery. If Christ is the representative for all people, we have to discover the suffering of our people in his suffering, his humiliation, his body scarred by the nails of the cross. This is our people tortured, crucified, spat upon, and humiliated for whom Christ our Lord is represented in order to give our very difficult situation a sense of redemption.
America has its own history of crucifixions. The era of lynching in the United States lawfully placed Black bodies on trees to die before crowds of white onlookers. Their deaths were sacrifices to white supremacy. Recently I learned about the Waco Horror, the lynching of 17-year-old Jesse Washington in 1916 in Waco, Texas, 100 miles from where I live today.
It was a spectacle. A family affair. After cutting off his ears and extremities, the crowd burned Jesse Washington’s body. “Shouts of delight went up from the thousands of throats,” wrote the Waco Times-Herald (see article in The Undefeated).
This history is difficult to read, to write, to understand. As a white person in America, I will never fully grasp the terror and horror of lynchings and police brutality today. I am caught in the web of sin.
Yet as a Christian, I believe the murder of Jesse Washington, like victims of police brutality today, are God-forsaken acts of human evil. I will never believe they are justified.
Just like the nails in Jesus’ wrists, the suffocation he experienced, or the nausea that Mary felt while watching, are never to be glorified.
On Good Friday, I feel it is particularly important for Christians to remember that suffering is not holy. Suffering, oppression, systemic violence, and white supremacy are not of God’s will. While God calls us to disrupt these systems, which involves persecution and suffering, this never justifies the violence that occurs.
Jesus’ black life ain’t matter, I know I talked to his daddy. Said you the man of the house now, look out for your family
— Chance the Rapper, “Blessings”
Jesus died so that we’d stop killing people. He took death on his body to expose that suffering is not God’s will.
Jesus died to show us another way.
Jesus’ way does not glorify violence — he bore no arms. Despite this radical witness to nonviolence, Jesus’ church has condoned violence for millennia and continues to do so today by sanctifying war, idolizing patriotism, harboring white supremacy, and marginalizing LGBT communities, to name a few examples.
When will Jesus’ church, his people, stop crucifying him?
The God that gave us life does not condone violence. I have learned that this also includes violence toward ourselves.
I listened to a podcast this morning on “The Soul in Depression.” In his interview, Parker Palmer states, “I do not believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live a living death. I believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live life fully and well.”
In my year of service as a Young Adult Volunteer, I have been battling depression. Many of you know that I experienced a struggle with anorexia several years ago, and thank God, am now well into recovery. But depression has been a lingering ghost, a void on the horizon always threatening to swallow me whole.
In December, I made the decision to taper off my anti-depressant that I had taken for 4 years. I felt that it was time for me to know who I was without chemical inputs. I am grateful for the medication I took — it was a good and necessary aid to me for those years. But I felt a yearning for a new chapter.
The eight weeks of tapering launched me into a grim and excruciating struggle. Some days it felt that I had needles in my stomach, and if I moved or breathed, they would lacerate me. Other days I felt alienated from any sense of God that I resented the thought of a higher power. My mind turned in on itself to find what felt like nothing but decay, anxiety, and hatred.
Through that time, I learned to reach out for help and to not suffer in silence. My community supported me. Coming out of the depression empowered me to speak up for myself at work and in my relationships.
In the process of recovery, I found truth in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh: “Understanding suffering brings compassion and relief.”
While many days I wanted to give up and I felt violent toward myself, there was also a whisper in my ear to remember compassion. To look deeply into my suffering and remember it is part of the world’s pain.
Depression was not a sign that God hated me or had abandoned me. I could keep going. I could envision when I would experience joy again. I didn’t need to trap myself in situations that kept me in despair. “Jesus didn’t die for nothin’,” my mentor Carolina reminded me.
Good Friday is good because Jesus forgives us. And what else?
Jesus died on the cross not to glorify suffering, or justify the state’s violence. There is nothing good or heroic about death. Jesus’ blood was a tragedy. No one else needs to die to remind us that life is holy.
And yet tragedy is not the final word. Jesus was victorious because God resurrected him from the dead. God transformed human violence to a new way of life, a way that enters the Kingdom of God.
In that Kingdom, God is with us, here on earth. Emmanuel (God-with-us) embodies compassion (from compati, or to suffer with). God-with-us suffers, and offers the grace of understanding our human pain.
Jesus died so we’d stop killing people. In a world that justifies lynching and sanctifies gun violence, Jesus also offers us another way — the way of repentance, truth-telling, healing, and ultimately, forgiveness and new life.
We wait for the resurrection — when graves are uncovered and truth comes to light. We wait for the day when war, racism, and are things of the past. But we can’t wait to act for that different world to come. Jesus is dying all the time. When is he gonna rise?
Tonight, the cross stands empty, but the ground beneath our feet is still rich with God.
“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing ripened until it is real, so that he who began it all can feel you when he reaches for you.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, the Book of Hours
