Living with Crucifixion

A Queer Good Friday Homily

Jesus is dead– Crucified because he was foolhardy enough to believe that the radical nature of God’s love personified could change the world. He believed he could do what he set out to do at the beginning of his ministry, when he preached that

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
    to proclaim release to the prisoners
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to liberate the oppressed,
    and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

But because that was such a threat to the oppressive empire of the time, that empire killed him. We killed him.

To be clear, I don’t mean you or me individually put Jesus on that cross. Jesus was crucified because the collective we –from Jesus’ first followers up to us today– have been willing to be complicit in the systems of an empire that harm the very people Jesus came to liberate.

We are all involved in systems that prolong the suffering of others. Take my phone, for example. The components of this technology were likely put together in a sweatshop by under-resourced people in a factory where they can’t escape inhaling micro plastics, micro metals, and other toxins that damage their lungs but they can’t get medical care because they are paid less than poverty wages.

Take my groceries. If I buy produce that’s out of season, I’m likely buying something that was picked too early by a day-laborer who’s paid less than poverty wages, then transported hundreds of miles by truck– poisoning the earth with smog. But I often don’t have a choice but to buy those things because the local, ethically-sourced produce is often more expensive and I have bills to pay if I want to keep the roof over my head.

I could go on.

We, as a society, have created a world wherein it’s impossible to make a harm-free choice. That is systemic sin, sin that we as a collective commit as a body. It’s simultaneously no one person’s fault, and all of our fault.

But here’s the extra-nefarious part of it. We both contribute to and are victims of these sinful systems of greed. We are simultaneously crucifying others and being crucified ourselves, especially when we try to step outside of this system.

Many of us know what it is to be crucified with Christ. We know what it is to be the empire’s scapegoat so that the empire can keep enacting this systemic sin. We’ve seen LGBTQ+ people be blamed for moral depravity in America, people of color blamed for violence in our communities, and women blamed of heresy just for following their calling. Those that would use us as scapegoats use us to distract the world from the corporate sin that keeps the poor in poverty and shows no love to our neighbor. We know what it is to have our dignity stripped from us, in the way that Christ’s dignity was stripped from him as he hung from the cross, naked and gasping for air.

We also know what it is to be crucified for preaching love when the world would have us amplify hate. We know what it is to be persecuted for suggesting that love and openness --not fear and submission-- is the way to God. We know what it is to take on the burden of preaching the gospel in a world that is deaf to it, knowing that our cross will come soon enough.

As a queer person, I can’t ascribe to a theology or worship a god that demands my death in order be considered faithful. I can’t, not in a world that demands my crucifixion every day simply for existing.

As a pastor, I can’t in good conscience encourage you to either. The cross should have been the end of all death because Jesus, in his own words, said that he came to give us life abundantly. He gave us something beautiful to live for, but our world still reeks of crucifixion.

Where does that leave us this Good Friday evening, as we sit at the foot of the cross and grieve the death of our Lord and Teacher?

Photo by Vaishakh pillai on Unsplash

I want to invite us to sit with something Jesus told his disciples before his death. In the Gospel of John, Jesus commands us to love one another as he loved us. He then says “there is no greater love than this, than to lay down your life for a friend.”

Often, we assume that “laying down” one’s life is a euphemism for being willing to die for the people we love– and that’s what it means in our modern context. We imagine taking a bullet for those we love, placing ourselves into the role of the glorious hero. But when I look at what Jesus says here, I don’t see glory. I don’t see heroism. In fact, the Greek word for “lay down” can also mean to “put down” to “place” to “let go of.” In my study this week, I could not find a single instance in the New Testament where this word was used in relation to being willing to die. It seems that we may have seen Jesus’s words with a modern eye and assumed that “lay down your life” meant the same thing then as it does now. We read our context into the text instead of letting the text speak for itself. Perhaps our selfish desire for honor and glory has fooled us into thinking that the greatest thing any of us can do for our families, loved ones, or even our God is die.

It reminds me of a scene from the Broadway musical Hamilton. During the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton desperately wanted to be on the battlefield as part of George Washington’s army. He was convinced that the most helpful thing he could do was to die for his country and he wanted the opportunity to have his name written down in history. But Washington refused to give him a battalion. He recognized that Hamilton’s financial acuity would be desperately needed to rebuild the country after the war; Hamilton would be much more useful to the country alive than he ever would be dead. Hamilton, young and incensed, doesn’t understand why Washington won’t give him this shot at eternal glory. Washington responds to Hamilton by saying, “Young man, dying is easy. Living is harder.”

Perhaps our challenge this Good Friday is not to ask ourselves what we would die for in order to be like Christ because there’s already been enough death. Rather, maybe we need to ask what we’re willing to live for, even and especially in a world that’s too addicted to crucifixion. What sacrifices are we willing to make to live into the risky love that Jesus called us to? What do we need to lay down so we might have space in our hands to pick up the Gospel of Jesus? What would it look like to lay down our need to be right, our need to be in control, our need to keep things the way they are, our need to be perfect, our need to judge, our need for certainty? How much of Christ’s radical love could we carry into the world if we lay down our lives as we know them? How do I empty my hands of how I think my life should go so I have space to pick up the life Christ proclaims at the beginning of his ministry?

As we prepare to leave this space and tomorrow wake to the grief of Silent Saturday, we are the disciples. Christ is dead and we have to figure out what it means for us to continue living in his absence. How will we continue to carry his message of love and liberation into a world so bent on crucifying its neighbor? How do we cleanse ourselves of the desire to crucify others?

As we go into this cold night, let us be ever-open to laying our lives down so we may have space in our hands to pick up Christ’s love.