It's Not Good Friday
In 1917, on a bright spring morning, in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, Memphis Tennessee, a large crowd gathered for the lynching of one Ell Persons.[1] Ell, a local farmer, was accused of murdering 16-year-old Antoinette Rappele and chopping off her head with an axe. The mob that day was orderly and calm.
They gave Antoinette’s mother the opportunity to say a few words to the large throng gathered. She begged them not to shoot Persons or do anything to shorten the suffering he would endure. Surprisingly, Persons was also given the opportunity to make a statement. The lone black face in a sea of white lynchers, he was unable to speak, but rather looked away.
What the history books and the newspapers do not mention is that God was there that day as well. God had disguised themselves as a middle-aged woman and stood at the edge of the crowd watching. God looked into the angry, bloated faces of their children and felt a profound sadness welling up in their heart. God’s children were arrogant and entitled, callous and full of hatred. They felt so justified in their wrath. They were the heroes in a story of their own making. In a word, God’s children gathered here were despicable, anyone else would have considered them a waste of existence. Yet God loved them as only a mother can.
Then God looked upon their beloved son Ell Persons, all alone and terrified. A sinking feeling of despair rose up from God’s belly, her lips quivered in a low moan. In pain, God fainted.
The crowd began to shout, “Burn him!” Persons was led to a cleared space nearby and doused in gasoline. Those leading the mob cut off his ears and hoisted him above the pyre they had built. Then they lit him on fire. Later, his decapitated head was driven back into Memphis and put on display at a barbershop for a while.
Afterwards, God walked the streets of Memphis for days, beside themselves in agony. History had repeated itself, another one of their children was gone.
***
There’s something that doesn’t quite add up if we think that what happened on Good Friday was good. If you consider the brutality of the crucifixion, is it any wonder that an entire generation has turned away from it? Give us fluffy bunnies and chocolate eggs, anything to take our minds off how “the Passion” actually went down.
Us silly Christians who insist on calling it good are mostly vaccinated against the violence. We take our steady doses of news and media, to inoculate ourselves against being disturbed by others’ pain.
We try to make the crucifixion this amazing event. Our version is the following: God is an angry God and he was going to kill us because of our sin - we cheated on our taxes or had a dirty thought. But because he’s also somehow so merciful and loves us so much, he decided to arrange to have his own son killed instead. Jesus died in my place, because obviously someone had to die to appease this blood thirsty deity.
We learn from this telling of the crucifixion that violence is inevitable and effective. That it somehow has the potential to balance the scales and make things right again.
***
However, the real Good News is not that “Jesus died in my place”, as if torture and execution are a given. These are not the tools of God. The violence of the Cross is a reflection of ourselves, not him. The Good News is that the God of the universe, creator of everything, is the victim of our violence, but has chosen to forgive and reconcile.
Still, God is a traumatized God. Is there any scene more painful than to watch your child being killed?
On some level, we don’t think of God as a real being, so we rarely consider the lingering trauma of that event. As if resurrection Sunday washed away the pain of a murdered son. Or as if other forms of crucifixion weren’t continuing to happen as a daily event in our world.
From that trauma God identifies with the traumatized, the mother whose son was shot to death or the father whose daughter dies of cancer. That deep pain is real and it doesn’t completely go away.
Some of the main characters found in the Bible knew the heart of God, by knowing the pain God experiences in seeing us kill each other.
The first parents, Adam and Eve, had profound insight into the mind of God. They walked alongside God in the Garden of Eden and received their calling from him. Eve and Adam also lived long enough to watch their children murder each other. Cain murdered his brother Abel in the field, jealous that the sacrifice his brother offered was pleasing to the Lord, while his was not. It was history’s first lynching.
Cain murdering Abel[2] is a story that continues to this very day.
Imagine the grief Adam and Eve had to live with knowing their firstborn had beaten to death his younger brother. The grief of Adam and Eve foreshadowed God’s own grief as he also went through the experience of watching his own son murdered by his fellow humans.
Another striking example is Abraham and his adult son Isaac, patriarchs of the faith, who were asked to perform a macabre pre-enactment of a lynching - one highly reminiscent of the Ell Persons murder. [3] God said to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” As Abraham was woefully about to go through with it, God intervened at the last minute and told him not to lay a hand on Isaac.
This was not some sick psychopathic test of how much Abraham was willing to lose for his faith. God was not asking him to prove dedication through the killing of Isaac, for he is not a god of human sacrifice. God was sharing his heart with Isaac and Abraham– his pain and grief over the violent murders of his children – so that they could live with greater mercy, greater sensitivity, and a greater sense of justice. Isaac barely escaped a lynching, but God’s own son would not.
King David, a “man after God’s own heart”, would live long enough to watch his children murdering each other after the rape of an immediate family member.[4] One wonders, was David always a man after God’s heart or did he finally become that after experiencing the depths of this sorrow?
Finally is the example of Mary, who carried the burden of a deep knowledge of God. She was present for Christ’s traumatic birth and never looked away during his government sanctioned lynching.
***
Christian worship is centered around communion, which is based on the Passover meal. It’s pretty weird that Jesus would redefine the Passover meal by saying “eat my flesh and drink my blood”. People thought it was weird in the first century, and people think it is weird now. Yet Christians continue this tradition of communion to this day.
When I was younger, I always experienced the taking of communion with tremendous guilt. I felt so bad that God arranged for Jesus to be brutally executed because I looked at porn, drank too much over the weekend or hated my neighbor. It seemed extreme on God’s part – killing your kid because you were going to kill me instead, but you wanted to be with me forever in white robed, fluffy cloud heaven. Who’d want to be around a psycho like that?
But the violence in the crucifixion is about our own nature, not God’s. The cross is a human innovation, not a divine one. The true miracle is that despite our violence, there is forgiveness and a path to reconciling. And the resurrection is in no way to deny the sadness and sense of loss that God must carry around. This is a grief that I have no firsthand experience of, though many of the women and men in the Bible did.
As the brutal lynching of Ell Persons and countless others shows, crucifixion is baked into our history and culture. The violence in our hearts is something we must daily struggle against. The crucifixion is still happening every day. God watching her babies die.
This violence and trauma are at the roots of Christianity. It is where we come from. Christians pray “Give us eyes to see the world the way you do”, but do we really want to see? We sing “Show me your glory”, but we may be disturbed by what we find.
REFERENCES
1. Dray, Phillip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. (2003). Modern Library
2. Genesis 4
3. Genesis 22
4. 2 Samuel 13