The Blood of Jesus

 (Image Credit: AP. Blood in the streets of Gaza City after an Israeli air strike killed seven, July 12)

The blood of Jesus runs red in the streets of Gaza and the church barely takes notice.  In his book The Cross and The Lynching Tree, James Cone defines salvation as "a liberating event in the lives of all who are struggling for survival and dignity in a world bent on denying their humanity" (p. 151).  For Christians we see this salvation illustrated most clearly in the person of Jesus and paradoxically in the scandal of the cross.  It is on the cross that the Son of God becomes the Oppressed One, aligning himself not with the rich or the powerful, but the poor, the oppressed, the trampled upon.  Tragically, the Jim Crow South never recognized the crucified body of Jesus in the lynched bodies of about 5,000 black men, women and children who were brutally beaten, burned, mutilated and hung from trees.  And today we often fail to recognize the blood of Jesus in the shed blood of all who suffer unjustly.

The blood of Jesus runs red in Gaza where the targeting of civilian homes have left over 200 Palestinians dead, over 40 of them children.  The latest victims were four children whose only crime was playing on the beach when an Israeli airstrike violently ended their lives.

The blood of Jesus runs red in Chicago where the combined forces of capitalism and racism have trapped many blacks in ghettos buried in poverty, violence and despair, while being ignored by the rest of society.  Over 80 shootings took place over the course of Independence Day weekend alone.  Let us not be deceived, ghettos are no Chicago phenomenon.  They can be found all throughout the US.  They are created by the rich and the powerful to keep the poor from access to resources and power.

The blood of Jesus runs red in Syria where the death toll continues to rise higher and higher though mainstream media no longer report the atrocities taking place there.  We are over that I guess and on to other things.

Wherever innocent blood is shed the blood of Jesus flows, yet many of us who are his followers fail to recognize this fact.  Many of us care more about the sufferings of fictional characters in shows like Orange Is The New Black than the very real suffering of victims in Gaza or the ghetto.  The cross of Jesus ought to fuel us with a desire to put an end to any more crosses.  The shed blood of Jesus ought to fuel us with an indomitable desire to stop the shedding of any more innocent blood.  The horror of the cross ought to move us to place our very lives on the line in order to create a world where violence, oppression and unnecessary suffering are nothing but distant, distant memories.

Over 2,000 years have passed and yet the blood of Jesus, the blood of the persecuted, the blood of the trampled upon still flows.  When will we take notice?

Following The Way,
Kevin

No More Crosses

I was fighting back the tears during the Good Friday service today.  I usually try to avoid thinking about the suffering of Jesus on the cross because I cannot bear it.  It makes my soul shudder.  If I had been one of the disciples I would have run away too.  There's no way I would have been able to bear witness to such pain.  The cross has been sanitized by the church these days.  Many churches feature shining crosses of silver, bronze or even gold.  But the cross that Jesus bore was no sanitized cross and the crucifixion Jesus endured was no sanitized experience.  It was horrifically violent with a brutality that not only marred the body on the cross, but the soul of every person who witnessed it.  It was a scandal.   It was the best way the Romans knew how to completely humiliate and dehumanize its enemies and it was effective.

I was fighting back the tears in church because I realized that Jesus was not the first person to be crucified and he certainly wasn't the last.  We live in a world where those in power are obsessed with crucifying their victims.  I don't believe that it was the wrath of God that brought Jesus to the cross.  Was it the wrath of God that led to the extermination of the native peoples in America?  Was it the wrath of God that caused African slaves to endure the horror of the Middle Passage and then a lifetime of slavery?  Was it the wrath of God that caused bloated black bodies found hanging from trees during the Jim Crow era in the South?  Is it the wrath of God that causes women to be oppressed so men can maintain power?  Is it the wrath of God that necessitates the destruction of communities of people of color all over the world so that white western men can maintain their power?  Is it the wrath of God that demands that LGBT people be crucified so that straight people can feel normal?

No!  God never crucified anyone.  All of the crucifixions mentioned above were done by people so desperate to maintain power that they failed to see human beings as human beings.  They themselves forget their own humanity and became monsters inflicting horrible violence and cruelty upon others who never deserved their crucifixions.

I believe that God has a dream for this world.  I believe that God imagines a world where there are no more crosses.  A world where the poor are not crucified to maintain the lifestyles of the rich; a world where women are not told that they are less than; a world where power over the many lays not in the hands of the few.  Are we bold enough to join God in this dream?  Do we have the capacity to imagine a world without violence and oppression?  May God hep us all to imagine and make reality a world where there are no more crosses.

Following the Way,
Kevin