There is a gross violence done by institutional christianity’s interpretation of Jesus’ torture and death. It is not only normalized; it is sanctified. The torture and violence done to Jesus on the cross is perversely claimed as saving us. Nothing about anyone being tortured saves us. Nothing about a cross saves us. Nothing about spears and crosses, bows and arrows, guns and bombs, poison gases and nuclear weapons save us. Only by Militarism coercing us to believing their killing saves us do we believe it does. The result is the torture and violence can go on and on and on, still perversely claimed as salvific.
“The soldiers apprehended the young catechumens, Revocatus and Felicity… With them also was Vibia Perpetua, nobly born… and a son, a child at the breast.” Perpetua relayed “we were still under legal surveillance and my father was liked to vex me… ‘Can I call myself nought other than that which I am, a Christian.’” “Another day as we were at meal we were suddenly snatched away to be tried; and we came to the forum… Then Hilarian passed sentence upon us all and condemned us to the beasts.” The nonviolent Steve Biko was falsely charged with violence and replied, “I’m talking about the violence in which people are baton-charged by police, beaten up. I’m talking about police firing on unarmed people. I’m talking about the indirect violence you get through starvation in the townships.” The apartheid rulers soon sent their police to beat Biko to death. In his sermon, Loving Your Enemies, Martin Luther King understood, “You will throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. You will bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. You will send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour.” So it was that white supremacists murdered Dr. King. Environmentalist Berta Caceres confided in her sister just before Christmas 2015, “The messages never stop, the harassment never stops, they have me under surveillance. They don’t care that I have children. (They) are going to kill me.” Three months later corporate hit men murdered her. Shortly before his murder, Brother Christian de Chergé wrote, “If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God. … Jesus was not a stranger to this brutal departure… I ask them to be able to associate such a death with the many other deaths that were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.”
“your death was nothing special it was the death of uncounted criminals convicted under Roman law, in fact, two others died with you on that same hill, on that same day in that same way: bloody suffocation on a cross so if you had lived today your death would have been likewise ordinary and likewise brutal: exploded veins in the electric chair after an unfair trial or blood gushing out… (from) an officer’s bullet in your gut, no trial at all. Jesus, Jesus this is why your death matters. because it didn’t — not to the ones who killed you, not to the soldier who thrust a lance in your side as he had done to so many men on so many days like this one – not to the men who cast lots for your clothes, profiting off your pain, your death matters, your death is precious because it was common, ordinary — you share the agony of every tortured spirit who has ever walked this earth you share every cry muffled under the boot of one in (control). and so i know that they with whom you have shared agony will also share in your rising.” (Your Death Was Nothing Special – Avery Arden) https://binarybreakingworship.com/2021/02/23/your-death-was-nothing-special/
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, keep me wise about warriors who tell me their violence saves me.
Question: How long am I going to let rulers and their soldiers get away with murder?
April 13, 2025 Gospel Luke 22:14-23-56 Palm Sunday / Passion Sunday