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The Lynching Tree And Christ: Solidarity With The Victims

The Lynching Tree And Christ: Solidarity With The Victims

Last updated on: December 17, 2024 at 3:17 am by Henry Karlson

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The Lynching Tree And Christ: Solidarity With The Victims 2024-12-17T03:17:16-05:00 Henry Karlson

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We are called to promote justice, and that means, not only must we avoid hurting others, we must not to ignore those who need our help:

There are two kinds of injustice: one, whereby we inflict injuries; the other, whereby we neglect to avert those inflicted on others when we can. For in a certain sense we ourselves are oppressors when we scorn the downtrodden though we are able to defend them from oppression. Nor does it avail me anything that I do not circumvent or deceive a man if I permit him to be deceived or circumvented. [1]

Jesus dies again and again in all those who are unjustly hurt and persecuted, even if they are being persecuted by Christians, claiming they are doing it in the name of Christ. Every time a Christian undermines human dignity and abuses or kills someone, they add to Jesus’ own suffering. This is because Jesus suffers in and with everyone who suffers injustice in the world. What we do to others, we do to Jesus. Christians who embraced lynching embraced the way of the cross, not in accordance to the way Jesus taught, but in the way of Rome, who sought to control others, and if they couldn’t, to destroy them. Christ used (and continues to use) the cross as a way join in solidarity with the oppressed so that in and through him and his resurrection, they can transcend it all and experience the glory which God wants them to have. This connection between the lynching tree and the cross, therefore, is a legitimate one to make, and so we should listen to James Cone, when he wrote:

As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists – the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided, spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purposes was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place.[2]

Jesus will be coming again to judge the living and the dead, to offer consolation to those who suffered unjustly, as well as to reveal the consequences which follow those who took on and embraced such abuse. Jesus will bring together all those who have suffered so that they can receive his consolation, even as all those who have done evil will find themselves coming together and being made one, a unity which is represented in Scripture as Babylon the Great:

Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, “So shall Babylon the great city be thrown down with violence, and shall be found no more; and the sound of harpers and minstrels, of flute players and trumpeters, shall be heard in thee no more; and a craftsman of any craft shall be found in thee no more; and the sound of the millstone shall be heard in thee no more; and the light of a lamp shall shine in thee no more; and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall be heard in thee no more; for thy merchants were the great men of the earth, and all nations were deceived by thy sorcery. And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slain on earth” (Rev. 18:21-24 RSV).

The eschatological judgment is a universal judgment, and in it, Christ will reveal the evil which was established in human history, even as Christ will show the way the eschaton draws us out and beyond such evil in order to transcend it so that we can find our way into the kingdom of God. All the evil, all the suffering, all the cruelty, will receive its reward, so that even those who say, Lord, Lord, will find, insofar as they have joined themselves to the way of Babylon, that they are not known by Christ. Those who have been persecuted and hurt, those who have been lynched or rounded up in concentration camps or mass detention centers, those forced into slavery, that is, those who have had their human dignity undermined, will find Christ knows them because he was in and with them as they were being persecuted. Bulgakov, in his commentary on the Apocalypse, tells us that the author of Revelation warns us that God’s vengeance is indeed coming, a vengeance, to be sure, which is just and mediated by grace, and yet a judgment which will be experienced by all those who have waged injustice:

These last words are an unusual addition, in that they relate not only to persecution of religion and its adherents, but to all who have died from any form of bourgeois-political terror. The thought thus takes on a somewhat political character – vengeance for all kinds of violence done by man to man. [3]

Most of us will find that we find ourselves connected both to Babylon and to Christ, because we sin and, in and through our sin, join in with the evil of the world, even as transcend that sin insofar as we have joined ourselves to Christ. We must ready ourselves for the judgment to come, accepting that Christ will condemn the ways we have tied ourselves to Babylon the Great; to do that, we must repent, deny ourselves and our evil attachments, and make restitution the best we can for the evil which we have done. That is, insofar as we have done evil and join in with Babylon the Great, we will find we are not known by Christ; that is because we have created a false persona, one which Christ does not know; we must deny that persona, we must free ourselves from it, so that we can become the person Christ knows. This will likely be a continuous struggle throughout our life; we must do what we can, not just in word, but in deed. The more we make restitution, the more we help those who are being hurt by the evil of the world, the more we embrace justice, the more we will find ourselves going over to Christ and his ways, becoming the person Christ wants us to be: “The follower of the active life, by harboring the stranger, clothing the naked, governing the subject, redeeming the captive, protecting him who is oppressed by violence, is continually cleansing himself from all his sins and enriching his life with the fruit of good works.”[4]

While we have sinned, while we have embraced the way of Babylon, we can change. We can take our place with Christ, showing Christ love and affection by showing love and affection to those who are being persecuted. We can join ourselves with the persecuted, to be found amongst them, to be in solidarity with them. While this will not change the evil which we have done, Christ will use our repentance and our penitence to transform us, so we will no longer find ourselves bound to the evil we have done. For Christ, in his solidarity with all who suffer, speaks on their behalf on the cross, speaking words of mercy and love, indicating how he is willing to forgive all so long as people come to him and let him take their sin and evil upon himself so he can discard it into the fires of hell. This is why the eschatological judgment, which certainly, is something we should not treat lightly, does not have to lead us to despair, for we can and should see it as the means by which Christ will reveal the final fate of sin, freeing the world and all creation from its influence.

[1] Julianus Pomerius, The Contemplative Life. Trans. Mary Josephine Suelzer, PhD (Westminster, MD: The Newman Bookshop, 1947), 149-50.

[2] James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 31.

[3] Sergii Bulgakov, The Apocalypse of John: An Essay in Orthodox Dogmatics. Trans. Mike Whitton. Rev. Michael Miller (Munster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2019), 146.

[4] Julianus Pomerius, The Contemplative Life, 32.

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