‘I told the congregation we had to stop sleeping by the fire.’

Hadley Basque invited me to lunch. He’d been listening to my sermons [on the crucifixion] and wanted to respond. Hadley was one of the nonbelievers in the congregation. An artist who worked with the homeless in a downtown emergency shelter, Hadley was active in the church but didn’t buy into any of the theology. I liked Hadley. I always learned things, talking with him.

"I was a prisoner of war during the Korean War," he began. "I was in the camp for two years. The winters were the hard part. In North Korea the winters are very cold. It snows. The ground freezes. We had to sleep in drafty barracks on thin boards with one thin blanket. In winter, the guards would make charcoal fires in these barracks. They stood around the fires, warming themselves, in front of us. If you wanted to, you could take your blanket and go sleep by the fire. The guards didn’t mind.

"You could always tell the prisoners who had given up hope. They would go sleep by the fire. It was warmer there. You could make it through the night without shaking from the cold. But being warmed that way lowered your resistance. The ones who slept by the fire would get sick, pneumonia or flu, or God knows what. They’d last for a while, but they wouldn’t make it. They would die.

"Those of us who survived – we were the ones who never went to sleep by the fire."

I looked at Hadley across the table. There was quiet. The restaurant noises clattered around us. I knew what it felt like to sleep away from the fire, but I hadn’t known, until then, that it might be a way to survive.

I told the congregation we had to stop sleeping by the fire. My objection to every theology of the cross was that it mystified violence and offered dangerously false comfort. The restless concern, the fire in my bones, was to face violence in the world more squarely. Theology cloaked violence and taught people to endure it. Christianity’s denial of violence appalled me.

You couldn’t look at Jesus on the cross and see there, as the old liturgy said, "one perfect sacrifice for the sins of the whole world." You couldn’t see the face of love. You couldn’t see a model for an interior psychological process of dying and rising.You couldn’t see pain inflicted by God for the spiritual edification of believers. All these ways of seeing Jesus on the cross ended up sanctifying violence against women and children, valorizing suffering and pain, or denying loss. You couldn’t look on the man of sorrows and give thanks to God without ending up a partner in a thousand crimes.

The actual historical event of Jesus’ crucifixion was neither sweet nor saving. In Jesus’ time, the Romans occupied all of Palestine. The Roman empire overtaxed the peasants, confiscated peasants’ forfeited land and co-opted the Jerusalem Temple to serve the needs and wants of the ruling minority. The Romans and their collaborators in Jerusalem were unpopular with the peasants of Galilee, who resisted in many ways. Jesus, a Galilean Jewish teacher, resisted Roman exploitation and cultural domination by teaching and healing. A community gathered around him.

The Romans suppressed resistance by terrorizing the local population. Crucifixion was their most brutal form of capital punishment. It took place in full public view, to teach a lesson through terror. Those crucified were soldiers or slaves who had run away from service or enemies of the state, especially those fomenting political insurrection and resistance. Jesus was likely guilty as charged. His demonstration against the Jerusalem Temple would have been interpreted by Pilate, who used the Temple treasury to fund his public works projects, as insurrection. Pontius Pilate was notoriously cruel. Philo, Pilate’s contemporary, describes Pilate’s "outrages, wanton injuries, constantly repeated executions without trial." Jesus died a violent death, preceded by the torture of flogging, which was meant to score the flesh so deeply that the victim bled to death on the cross, sometimes lingering for days. Often the victim was simply tied to the cross. Jesus was nailed, the worst way to be hung. Seneca wrote: "Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain dying limb by limb, or by letting out his life drop by drop, rather than expiring once for all? Can any man be willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly weals on shoulder and chest, and drawing the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony? He would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross."

Jesus died relatively quickly, which means his wounds were very deep.

His absence was acutely felt. Many of his followers dispersed, anguished and afraid. A few women remained to tend the body and see to his burial. They grieved deeply. Over the years, Rita and I would contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ death. To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God. It is to say that those who loved and missed Jesus, those who did not want him to die, were wrong, that enemies who cared nothing for him were right. We believe there is no ethical way to hold that the Romans did the right thing. We will not say we are grateful or glad that someone was tortured and murdered on our behalf. The dominant traditions of Western Christianity have turned away from the suffering of Jesus and his community, abandoning the man on the cross.

Atonement theology takes an act of state violence and redefines it as intimate violence, a private spiritual transaction between God the Father and God the Son. Atonement theology then says this intimate violence saves life. This redefinition replaces state violence with intimate violence and makes intimate violence holy and salvific. Intimate violence ends sin. Behind the holy mask of intimate violence, state violence disappears.

– Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes