Historical studies of the practice of crucifixion show it to be a torture practice intrinsic to the politics of state violence (for one such study, Martin Hengel’s Crucifixion remains essential). In light of this, frequent talk by Christians of Jesus’ action on the cross as a necessary “saving action” is highly problematic, at best. At worst, it only reinforces state violence of nearly every sort. This address, “Crucified,” is my attempt to redress that problem.

      The following “Meditation” was delivered in the chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary, April 9, 2014. As with chapel meditations and many sermons it was based on a text, here I Corinthians 2:1-8. Moreover, its interpretive strategy is was based on contemporary rereading of scholarship on the Apostle Paul, setting Paul’s writings in their essential political contexts. Two of the commentaries I worked with and would recommend – there are others – are Hans Conzelmann, First Corinthians (Hermeneia series), and Richard A. Horsely, I Corinthians (Abingdon Series) . More importantly, I recommend the recent hermeneutical re-framings of Paul’s letters in postcolonial, political and feminist theological scholarship, in books like The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Paul in the Shadow of Empire,  The Colonized Paul: Paul in Postcolonial Eyes, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission, and Galations Reimagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished. My early readings on Paul’s “counter-imperial faith” can be found in my 2001 book, The Executed God.
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Mary Boykin Chestnut took opium.  White wife and mother on a Civil War plantation, she had just witnessed an African slave woman go mad with rage as she was sold away from her own Black husband and children. White Mary reports in her diary that she took opium, because the event “excited her so.” It quiets my nerves,” she wrote, “that I may quietly reason and take rational views of things otherwise maddening.”

Critical whiteness studies analyze the discourses we white folk routinely use, suggesting they are like an anesthesia, an opium of soothing assumptions, beliefs and logics to relieve the pain of our dominating positions, pain that would otherwise drive us mad perhaps to protest and lose our privilege.[1]

I

I liken this taking of opium to the wisdom that Paul here calls folly. Wisdom as folly does not mean that thinking and theory are, as such, problematic. The lofty wisdom of Paul’s concern here is that airy addiction to aligning our minds and hearts with the thinking of the rich and the powerful, “the rulers of the age.”

In contrast, Paul’s gospel aligned him with a torture victim on the cross, where, as Martin Hengel shows in his 1977 book, Crucifixion, the wild sadism of executioners had full reign, leaving victims to the birds and dogs of prey, often without burial, a fate worse than death in Mediterranean cultures – but a fate assigned to the politically seditious, to those inconvenient to state power and to those outside the circles of loyal officials and citizens. Jesus did not die of “old age.” He wasn’t stoned for blasphemy. He wasn’t beheaded. Those were deaths usually reserved for less serious offenders. He was crucified, which means, as theologian Jurgen Möltmann puts it, Rome and its religious allies saw him as political rebel.[2] Here is where we find the distinctiveness of Jesus’ death, the power of Paul’s gospel, and its needed power for today.

Crucifixion was a slave’s death. It was almost always the death of the poor. It was to be shamed and stigmatized. It was to be terrorized, caused to tremble when the imperial state placed its crucifixions, like lynchings, [3] as public reminders that if you get out of line, crucifixion might be your fate.

Now – as clear as it is that the death of the crucified Jesus was the death of one whose life ran counter to imperial ways – it is amazing that this political meaning of his “imperial execution,” as John Dominic Crossan terms it,[4] finds so little resonance in worship and preaching of Jesus’ person and work. Right here is where our “anesthesial theo-logics”[5] are at work. We reach for the opium, the wisdom that is folly – not that of the cross.

What is the anesthesial logic? I’ll term it here our divine plan thinking. This form of lofty wisdom, this folly, holds that Christ’s death is primarily about a supranatural rescue mission, a God coming from afar or above, to die on a cross “for us” to release us from sin, or maybe to exemplify great love for us. Then, we are graced with personal salvation –maybe as liberal life of moral virtue, or maybe as abundant life here and hereafter in heaven with a savior.

With this anesthesial theo-logic, the torture death of Jesus’ political crucifixion is often eclipsed, becoming a sacrificial “death” fitted into a schema of salvation – with little or nothing said about what got him killed, which was, primarily, his affirming and enacting prophetic justice and radically-inclusive love in new kingdom communities deemed threatening to religious and political powers.

The “rulers of the age” prefer anesthetizing lofty wisdom to the Jesus who lived life-unto-death for community liberated from the rulers. Rulers prefer Christians who go silent about Jesus’ ministry among heavily-indebted Galilean peasantries, silent aboutJesus’ rage on behalf of those poor who couldn’t afford paying for the rituals that Temple state officials demanded for healing and forgiveness, silence about Jesus who preached “good news for the poor” proclaiming their “release” and “liberty” (Luke 4:18-19). [6]

And so, churches anesthetized by divine salvation plans, that shear the cross of its political meaning, allow the state today to go its way, pursuing its criminal failure to end the plight of this nation’s 100 million in poverty or “near poverty today” – at least 20 percent of U.S. children in poverty.

The state can go its way draining public education funding, while spending mightily on public and private prisons for more than 2 million mainly black, brown and poor Americans and immigrants – tens of thousands tortured in solitary confinement. The prisons, overall, concentrate black, brown and poor as crucified flesh, caged in a system that is still overseen by a predominantly white supremacist ruling class, combining get-tough masculinism with hetero-normative “family values.” (For one of the best summaries of these dynamics, see Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.)

The state can go on its way, laying waste the lives of a million or more Iraqi citizens who died in the wake of a U.S. assault and occupation of Iraq, creating a death rate there greater than under Saddam Hussein. (This figure is provided and analyzed at an MIT site, “Iraq: the Human Cost”).

And so the state goes its way, coming to expression today in a President Obama, virtuous in some ways, but now working like a war criminal. He personally pours over high-resolution photos and holds seminars to construct kill lists of U.S. drone strikes (also: Bureau of Investigative Journalism). No war declared. No court ruling necessary. Just enmity declared by the U.S. killing state, meting out its drone penalty, death from the skies for over 4,000 people – nearly 1,000 reckoned to be civilians, over 200 among them children.

II

You may ask: where’s the hope, the new life? Easter will follow Passion Week – after all. To see the life, though, especially we white preachers and theologians, need to refuse our anesthesial theo-logics. When we do, we realize that the wisdom of the cross, of the crucified, is not looking away from the scandal of gruesome death, away from the piled up concentrated bodies worked by the corporate rulers of our age. We look into those bodies. We live into the worlds of those who struggle, hope and resist there. We weep there. We lament and rage there. We tell stories as we suffer and rebel there, in artful ways – from liturgies to street theater – to galvanize our dead in struggle with the living – thus making the rulers of the age tremble and – yes, as another Mary dreamed in Luke’s Magnificat, “putting down the mighty from their thrones, exalting those of low degree” (Luke 1: 52). There’s the power of the cross. Toni Morrison wrote in her novel, Beloved, “nothing that dies bad stays in the ground.” This is our hope.

It is this that is creatively, for Christians, archetypically, displayed in Jesus, stories of his life first told, perhaps, by women in lament who would have washed his body as in many Mediterranean cultures,[7] or maybe who gathered the body-parts left after birds and dogs of prey had done their worst, as do many mothers of the disappeared today.[8] Early followers of Jesus did not reach for opium, they embraced the crucified, collectively singing their lament and rage over the crucified, thus midwifing into action new prophetic communities of Jesus’ love and justice.[9] And no one, dying as bad as the crucified Jesus did, stays in the ground. Crucified flesh, dying bad, prompts re-membering story, song and practice, re-constituting life against the rulers of the age.

III

The resurrection of the crucified means that history’s many badly dying peoples do not “stay in the ground,” especially if we don’t reach for the opium. If we narrate their stories in our midst, they then rise from the killing fields of every colonizing repression and slaughter, from the dead of all the imperial wars, especially the many who have fattened U.S. global sovereignty today, not just the dead from countless American Indian peoples or from Africans’ slavery and Middle Passage – both rightly named “holocausts.”[10] The rising dead include those from throughout Latin America, from the U.S./Mexico border to Chile – indeed the names of Latin American and Caribbean nations, invaded and with governments overthrown are almost too many to name.[11]  We might name the U.S. slaughter in the Philippines, its scorched-earth wars, napalm and carpet bombings in Korea,[12] Vietnam and Cambodia,[13] the nuclear bombings of Japan,[14] drone strikes of Pakistan and Yemen, to those especially in today’s Palestine under U.S.-backed Israel’s illegal occupation,[15] extending to young men and women of color shot down by police or by people standing their ground playing PO-lice today. This structural violence is more than dramatic history; the events from that violence linger and torment the everyday lives of millions of people around us today.[16] And if you’re not on opium you can feel it.

The storied lives of all of these, artfully rendered, inviting our action – do we know them? Have we met their communities of struggle? It’s time to lay aside the theological anesthesia that prevent our tarrying among the crucified. Then we will see how rulers meet their match; how crucified peoples are on the rise? Do we count ourselves among the crucified? Are we there? If we are, we are also there where they crucified Jesus. Some of us here are closer to there than others of us. Some here are daily living amid crucified peoples. Others of us, especially if we’re comfortable in some Princeton or another, always need to fight our way – ever again, ever more imaginatively – to link our lives here to the powerful lives rising among the crucified peoples and their dead. Among these crucified, rising against the rulers of our age, is the wisdom and power of the cross.

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[1] See also, George Yancy, Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do? Routledge, 2012.