What Will You Lift Up?
“The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching.”
—James H. Cone
Read: John 19:16–30
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Botham Jean, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner: these bodies and names make up just a partial list of the twenty-first-century lynchings of people of color carried out by police officers and sanctioned by the state. I carry these stolen lives with me every day, as so many of us do. A friend of mine has written their names on a sticky note on a wall in her dining room. Soon she will need another one.
Meanwhile, institutional white churches continue to remain silent. Dear Christian, church member, religious leader, or moral guide: your silence perpetuates violence against the bodies of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) folx. Silence is complicity. Jesus lifts up the struggles of the poor and dispossessed.
A woman named Mary, living in a patriarchal society in which women were considered property, is chosen to be the bearer of the good news. Nine months later, Mary and Joseph are a homeless couple whose only access to shelter is a stable. Where will the unhoused safely live? Jesus lifts up the plight of the homeless.
As an infant, Jesus and his parents become refugees fleeing their home for Egypt. They seek asylum from a corrupt government and death threats. Jesus lifts up the plight of immigrants.
As an adult, Jesus becomes an organizer. He wants to shift the distorted, nationalistic religious narrative of his country and the world. He organizes those who are poor (including fishermen and sex workers) alongside those who havemore wealth (like doctors and tax collectors). The society he lives in is set up to divide people against one another based on religion, class, gender, and ethnicity.
Jesus’s mission is to unite them. He announces it loud and clear in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18).
Jesus teaches his group of organizers the importance of caring for the poor. He shows them how to engage in projects of survival. He starts a feeding program with a little boy’s lunch. He finds solidarity in the homes of friends like Mary and Martha. In the days of the coronavirus pandemic, workers who are fighting for $15 an hour and unions are leading similar projects of survival. I hope we don’t cast lots for their clothes when many of them get sick and die.
Jesus and his group of organizers understand that health care is a human right. Jesus is a health care worker who puts his life on the line by offering medical care to those deemed contagious. A woman with bleeding problems, lepers, and those with disabilities are given free medical care.
At Jesus’s crucifixion, the curtain of the temple—a divider that separates those who aren’t permitted to enter from those who have the proper credentials —is torn in two. Jesus’s crucifixion is a result of unjust government policies.
Will we continue to allow unfair government policies to lead to the capital punishment of innocent people? Pilate cannot wash his hands of Jesus’s blood; if we remain silent, we won’t be able to wash our hands of theirs.
As Jesus hangs on the cross, darkness covers the earth. Our very ecosystem is affected by the disregard of human life. On the cross, Jesus says, “I thirst.” He joins the cries of those without access to clean water, in the United States and around the world.
Jesus lifts up the cries of the poor until his last breath. He proclaims “It is finished” not because the demands of the poor have been met but because in his living, his feeding, his healing, and his organizing, he has demonstrated that society can be restructured. He has shown that we can honor the dignity and the imago Dei, the image of God, in every human being.
Like many leaders who came after him, Jesus was murdered because he disrupted the structures of society with an ethic of love. What he stood for did not mesh with state values. His life didn’t matter to the state, which felt it had to take it as a matter of instruction to the people. Jesus becomes “strange fruit,” as Billie Holiday sings in that mournful song by Abel Meeropol, hanging on the lynching tree.
When Jesus says “It is finished,” he is speaking to us. Dear Christian, churchmember, religious leader, or moral guide: he is calling you to lay down your excuses and lift up the cry of justice.
Reflect: What does this passage reveal about the devaluing of the lives of workers and BIPOC individuals? How are you working with those in your communities to dismantle systems of injustice?
Read: Isaiah 61:1–4. Jesus quotes the Hebrew Scriptures as a model for pursuing justice. It is for his values and actions that he is executed by the state but raised up by God.
Pray: Continuously crucified God, remind us that you stand in solidarity with those whose bodies are being mutilated by systems designed to break open our bodies. Give wisdom, creativity, and courage to workers, caregivers, and those working to dismantle structural racism wherever it is found. Amen.