Three Reflections on Crucifixion: Weaver, Cone, & Copeland
Crucifixion, the Crucified Today, & the Way of the Jesus
Today, I extend an offering for you to join me in reflection on three teachers whose words my soul is caught up in today. May they take us together into the life and death of Jesus for the love of the world.
After each set of passages, I invite us to take a few moments to pause, breathe, and reflect briefly on how God and God’s purposes might be unfolded for us in new and deepening ways through the challenging words of these theologians.
Please consider allowing yourself to treat this more like a meditation — a lectio divina — that relates to our whole being rather than simply a blog to read with your mind. Only by opening our full self to the revolutionary possibilities of Jesus explored by these writers will we find healing and transformation, and become those who heal and transform.
J. Denny Weaver
Let’s begin this series of meditations through the writing of Anabaptist theologian J. Denny Weaver. He leads us directly into the jaws of a provocative question: “Who killed Jesus?”1 Beginning here, we will seek to till the ground to ready the soil of our souls for the planting of the troublesome seeds offered by James Cone and M. Shawn Copeland.
The question of who killed Jesus matters more than we might realize. Largely this is because the way the Gospels read (or have been read), and the way many Christians talk about what the death of Jesus did for the world, are often contradictory and have led down dangerous and disastrous roads. The question, “Who killed Jesus?” relates directly to the question: “What was the purpose of Jesus’ death?” We might reply simply: to take away the sins of the world. But how does Jesus’ death do that? And what exactly was the problem with these sins?
Some claim that Jesus had to die for our sins because God cannot be in the presence of sin (an obvious heresy if we believe that Jesus was God since Jesus spent all of his recorded time hanging out with “sinners”), thus Jesus’s death was a substitute for all of ours allowing us to be “reconciled” to God. Others — most problematically — would put it somewhat differently, saying that God was using the cross as the moment when God could take out all his wrath on sin through the torture and death of Jesus, like some kind of twisted cathartic moment that gets it out of God’s system so that God is willing to talk to us again.
In such a theology, Weaver points out, we were taught a disturbing answer to the question, “Who killed Jesus?”
It would appear that God is ultimately the one who arranged for the death of Jesus as the payment that would satisfy divine honor or as the compensatory punishment required by the divine law. Although the traditional language has focused on Jesus’ death for sinners, asking about the agent behind the death points to God as both the author of the process or the agent behind the transaction that requires the death of Jesus as innocent victim, as well as the recipient of the death as payment to God’s honor. And Jesus’ earthly life appears to become an elaborate process whose purpose is accomplished when he is killed.2
Placing God in such a position contorts God into a being who needs murder and suffering (euphemistically called ‘sacrifice’) in order to get on with loving creation. This is, in fact, exactly the subconscious logic at work for many white American Christians—theologians like Mako Nagasawa and Dominique Gilliard have traced the relationships between this version of what’s called "atonement theology” to all manner of social evils perpetrated by supposedly Christian societies.
Weaver makes the opposite case:
Quite obviously not God but the evil powers killed Jesus, whether these powers are understood as Satan or in terms of earthly structures such as Rome, which is the symbolic representative of Satan in Revelation, or as the powers of death, sin, the law, and the flesh…as in Paul. God sent Jesus not to die but to live, to make visible and present the reign of God….The agent of Jesus’ death is not God but the powers of evil.3
He brings the meaning of this paradigm shift home in the following passage:
In carrying out [God’s mission to make visible the reign of God in history], Jesus was killed by the earthly structures in bondage to the power of evil. His death was not a payment owed to God’s honor, nor was it divine punishment that he suffered as a substitute for sinners. Jesus’ death was the rejection of the rule of God by forces opposed to that rule. In fact, [Jesus’ life]…exposes how incongruous it is to interpret this story as one whose ultimate purpose was to produce a death in order to satisfy divine justice. Far from being an event organized for divine requirement, his death reveals the nature of the forces of evil that opposed the rule of God. It poses a contrast between the attempt to coerce by violence under the rule of evil and the nonviolence of the rule of God as revealed and made visible by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When evil did its worst, namely, denying Jesus his existence by killing him, God’s resurrection of Jesus displayed the ability of the reign of God to triumph over death, the last enemy.4
Crucifying others is not something God does. Reading the cross in that way teaches us nothing about God. Rather, it we who crucify. We who have strayed far from the loving way of Jesus by seeking power over others through building empires, it is we who have turned from the self-sacrificing power of God to the others-sacrificing power of crucifying.
Jesus reveals a God who pursues relationship through every imaginable cost to himself. God is not the crucifying one. God is the crucified one. And through Jesus’ death and eventual resurrection, God inaugurates a new creation in which none shall crucify or be crucified again.
Friends, this is a healing word. We won’t unpack the endless meanings this shift in our relationship to the cross has for overcoming the shame, self-hate, abuse and violence cultivated in our culture from a false view of God — but I pray those countless restorative seeds of the good news of the truly loving God begin to unfold as the most beautiful blooms with your soul.
God’s love is so much better than we were told.
~pause~
~take a deep breath~
What is being said about God in these passages?
What is being challenged in you—beneath your mind and beliefs, what is being challenged in your soul and self?
What is being affirmed in you?
How is Christ breaking his body for your healing?
How is Christ calling you to make your own body available in service for the healing of the world?
~take a deep breath~
James H. Cone
In one of his last books, James Cone, a father of Black Liberation Theology, left behind a heart and soul shattering reflection on the meaning of suffering through the eyes of a people who were lynched and who turned in their suffering to the poor Jew from Nazareth who was lynched on a cross.
Cone held up a mirror to us all, particularly to white Christians, when he wrote, “What is invisible to white Christians and their theologians is inescapable to black people. The cross is a reminder that the world is fraught with many contradictions—many lynching trees.”5
Cone faced these harsh contradictions against the backdrop of his and his people’s own experiences of suffering:
I have thought about suffering all my life, especially when my wife, the love of my life, died of breast cancer at thirty-six. Such personal suffering challenges faith, but social suffering, which comes from human hate, challenges it even more. White supremacy tears faith to pieces and turns the heart away from God….If God loves black people, why then do we suffer so much? That was my question as a child; that is still my question.6
Against this brief background, I simply want to let his reflections in the closing pages of The Cross and the Lynching Tree to sit in front of us and do their work in us:
A symbol of death and defeat, God turned [the cross] into a sign of liberation and new life. The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the ‘least of these,’ the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices. Christians must face the cross as the terrible tragedy it was and discover in it, through faith and repentance, the liberating joy of eternal salvation.
But we cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualizing it, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering, and death. The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power.7
He goes on to make the horrifying connection between the cross of Jesus and the thousands of cross erected and filled with black bodies by white people in America who believed themselves to be Christians:
And yet another type of imagination is necessary—the imagination to relate the message of the cross to one’s own social reality, to see that ‘They are crucifying again the Son of God’ (Heb 6:6). Both Jesus and blacks were ‘strange fruit.’ Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the recrucified body of Christ. Every time a white lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.8
Cone finishes the book with these words:
No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters than black and white people. We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.
The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice. Just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary, so black people had no choice about being lynched. The evil forces of the Roman state and of white supremacy in America willed it. Yet, God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope ‘beyond tragedy.’9
~pause~
~take a deep breath~
What is being said about God in these passages?
What is being challenged in you—beneath your mind and beliefs, what is being challenged in your soul and self?
What is being affirmed in you?
How is Christ breaking his body for your healing?
How is Christ calling you to make your own body available in service for the healing of the world?
~take a deep breath~
M. Shawn Copeland
Our final meditation is guided by the Catholic womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. Copeland’s work has been transformative for me since I first read her book Enfleshing Freedom. I take the passages below from her latest, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience. She draws our thinking this Good Friday down from the heavens back into history, our own bodies, and into compassionate solidarity with suffering neighbors.
Following Jesus’ “way”, Copeland urges, must lead us to the foot of the crosses and crucified ones present in our midst today, and to love them with a love that would partner in the transformation of the causes of their suffering—to bring an end to crucifixions. She writes as a theologian about theology, but the same standard she seeks to hold her discipline too can be held up as a measure for the vocation of any disciple:
In order for Christian theology to be theology—credible, humble, if the probable and authentic mediation of God’s word in history, culture, and society—it must stand at the foot of the cross of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. To authenticate its fidelity to Jesus and his ignominious death on the cross, Christian theology must know, love, and serve the crucified Lord. That theology cannot and must not remain silent before the tears of a crucified world, the tears of crucified peoples. Indeed, when that theology comes face to face with the historical reality of the social oppression and immense suffering that oppression inflicts on God’s human creatures, theology must name the social, physical, and existential damage done by structural or social as well as personal or individual sin. Moreover, that theology must work out the relation between the murderous crucifixion of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth and the murderous crucifixion of countless children, women, and men whom we have impoverished, marginalized, and excluded through our power, privilege, and position. For to follow Christ crucified is to know and love and serve these least (Matt 25:45).10
Copeland guides us into the kind of lifestyle and work that is required of those who have come to know Christ and him crucified among the “least of these” living among us today. She reflects that the cross is bracketed by hunger — hunger that draws disciples together for meals. “Hunger,” she write,
constitutes a possibility for mystical-political discipleship and an authentic praxis of compassion and solidarity. If we would be disciples of Jesus, we must be willing to recognize and alleviate hungers—whether for food or truth or justice, whether our own or those of others. A praxis of compassionate solidarity, justice-love, and care for the poor and oppressed is a sign that we are on the ‘way’ Jesus is.
The cross rises between the meal that Jesus shares with his disciples before he dies and the bit of grilled fish that he eats with them in Jerusalem (Luke 24:41-43). At the Passover meal, Jesus declares to his friends that he shall not eat or drink again until the kingdom of God comes (Luke 22:16-18). He promises them that when the kingdom does come, they shall sit with him at his table in places set specially for them, eating and drinking with joy (Luke 22:28-30). If we would sit at his table we too must live in solidarity with the little ones and live at the disposal of the cross.11
This is the life Jesus calls us to. This is the way of one who rejects the violence of crosses and lynching trees and systems that leave some hungry, the way of one who seeks the welfare of the victims of violence, and who labors toward a world of shalom.
Such labor can and has many times led its practitioners to become victims of very real crosses throughout history (often erected by people where crosses). To “live at the disposal of the cross” is to make ourselves available to such an end as well.
Copeland has gathered together words whose living can birth new worlds. She envisions a mysticism—an inner journey of spiritual transformation through union with God—that is also political, a transformation of self that leads to efforts to transform society. She holds together compassion and solidarity: compassionate presence with the suffering in the depth of their grief and hardship, and solidarity with the suffering to link arms and march for an end to the forces of oppression that generate suffering.
Spiritual and political.
Interpersonal and structural.
This is the way of Jesus encountered in its rawest totality at the cross. The life and death of Jesus and the crucified ones crying out in our midst beseech us to join a new communion of lovers who embody such things.
~pause~
~take a deep breath~
What is being said about God in these passages?
What is being challenged in you—beneath your mind and beliefs, what is being challenged in your soul and self?
What is being affirmed in you?
How is Christ breaking his body for your healing?
How is Christ calling you to make your own body available in service for the healing of the world?
~take a deep breath~
~amen~
Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 89. In addition to this excellent book by Weaver, I recommend Mark Baker and Joel Green’s Recovering the Scandal of the Cross and Mako Nagasawa’s work at the New Humanity Institute as further guides to rethinking the atonement.
Ibid, 90
Ibid, 90-91
Ibid, 47
Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 159
Ibid, 156
ibid, 158
ibid, 154-55
Ibid, 166
Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, 127-28
Ibid, 126