Saturday, July 11, 2009
Jesus' suffering in a modern context
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Since 1972, thousands of Southwest Virginia's children have passed through Holy Land USA on church field trips. I was one of them.
The second time I boarded a bus and rumbled through Robert Johnson's scale model of biblical sites in Israel, I was 37 and employed as The Roanoke Times religion writer. That recent trip to Bedford yielded a story that will run in Sunday's paper. It's a piece I've wanted to do for a long time, and I owe thanks to the colleagues who helped me: news researcher Belinda Harris, photographer Kyle Green and video journalist Chris Zaluski.
Two things about Holy Land have always stuck with me: the altar call at the foot of Golgotha and a homemade cross I bought at the Bethlehem Barn gift shop. I hoped to find the crosses still there because they touched off a seeking period in my life. After buying one, I began to ride church vans to various congregations, comparing theologies and in many ways training for the job I now hold.
Today the Holy Land gift shop sits not in the shadowy barn, but in its own well-lighted building. Gone are the baskets of spikes that might have held Jesus' hands and feet to the cross. Gone, too, are the crosses made by the late Ray Ramsey. Ramsey, according to former Holy Land General Manager Richard Dooley, lived at the park and made hundreds of them -- tree branches tied with twine and nails driven into wood stained red with paint.
I was disappointed to find them missing. But then, while sitting on a pew in the barn, I saw it hanging above an old sink behind a pop machine: the last of Ramsey's crosses. Keith Vinson, Holy Land's current manager, let me buy it. It's still powerful. But as I've looked at it on my desk, I've questioned its meaning. After buying that first cross, I started to make them myself out of lilac branches and finishing nails. I stained the wood with blackberry juice. Sometimes I made tiny "King of the Jews" signs, mimicking the illustrations in Bible storybooks.
I grew up hard in the kind of trailer park police know well. Before I was 12, I'd seen drunken brawls, beatings and a shooting, some of them within my own family. I understand the appeal of a tortured but risen Christ. No doubt, that's what my homemade crosses were about.
Lately I've come to question that focus on Jesus' suffering, which is often portrayed as somehow unique. The Bible tells us two other men endured the same agonizing death alongside him. We know crucifixion was a common form of capital punishment in Jesus' time. Uncounted political prisoners, criminals and others died by the same horrifying violence. The torture and killing of Jesus is not singular in its brutality. It's not even uncommon.
Guantanamo. Daniel Pearl. Xin Yang. Neda. Dr. George Tiller. Ten gay Iraqis shot to death. Honor killings. Waterboarding. Beheading. Shooting. Stoning.
Even more disturbing, a recent Pew Research Center poll showed that a significant number of Christians agree with the statement "sometimes torture is justified." (Poll results are at tinyurl.com/c9d87m.)
Bishop John Shelby Spong argues in his book "Sins of Scripture" that obsession with the torture of Jesus can distort Christianity and be used to justify violence.
Do Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists rationalize torture and killing in roughly the same percentages as Christians? I don't know, although I suspect that violence fueled by fear and politics is a human sin, irrespective of religious orientation. But shouldn't religion call us out of violence and death and into redemption? I wonder. Am I washed in the blood of the lamb?
