The Good Friday story of Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a stark reminder that those who lust for power and control have always felt threatened by the presence of love and justice. It’s the story of every major revolution in the modern era. It’s the story of how every Empire and State holds as it’s trump card both the capacity and willingness to resort to violence as a means of controlling the people. As John Crossan puts it, this is the story of peace through victory, as opposed to peace through love.

 

It is the story, to use scholar Rene Girard’s term, of scape-goating violence. This is the mechanism, he claims, which the powerful have employed throughout history to control the masses. Find a single innocent victim, and sacrifice that person for the sake of “good order” – as defined by the dominant power. In Lenin’s chilling phrase, “you must be willing to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” The New Testament figure who advocates more openly for this mechanism is Caiaphas, the high priest: “It is better that one man should die than a whole nation should suffer.” The religious and political authorities collaborate and Jesus is selected as the sacrificial victim for the “good” of all. Charges are trumped up. His crucified body will be a neon sign, a public warning to all witnesses of the cost of daring to threaten the status quo with love and justice.

 

This crucifixion story is also the story that challenges in a profound way the metaphysics of a book like The Secret. This new age doctrine collapses, in absolute fashion, the external world of political and social realities into the subjective realm of personal consciousness. Oprah has popularized this notion captured by the magical thinking inherent in the phrase: “We create our own reality”. It takes a partial truth – that in the Western world we have attained a level of freedom and affluence whereby we can be legitimately challenged to take more responsibility for the quality of our lives and the lives of others – and turns this into an absolute. It teaches that the world outside of us is no more than a creation of our own consciousness – this represents the absolute collapse of the objective into the subjective realm.

 

But Jesus didn’t create the Roman Empire and he didn’t create the religious elites that put him to death. He didn’t “manifest” being tortured to death. These were objective realities that he bumped up against as a spiritually evolved person. It was not his intention to be a scapegoat. This was simply the cost of knowing in his heart that there was a more evolved way of being in the world. That way of being would mean that the political, religious, and economic structures of the world would need to be replaced by a new reality – what he called the Kingdom of God. This realm subverted Caesar’s realm. The powers weren’t prepared to reorganize at a higher level and Jesus became their scapegoat. There exists, outside of our personal consciousness, and beyond whatever we want to “intend” into being, very real powers and the institutions they have created, that oppose the best intentions of our most evolved people.

           

Just ask the people of Tibet. Another Good Friday drama is unfolding there. The Chinese powers are trumping up false charges against the Dalai Lama, claiming that he is behind the protest of the Tibetan people. Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, rants on about how this has all been “organized, premeditated, masterminded and incited” by none other than the Dalai Lama himself – despite the fact that he has won a Nobel Peace Prize and has said that if the violence continues he will withdraw from his position as spiritual leader of the Tibetans. The problem, we are asked to believe, does not lie with the iron-fisted, imperial manner of the State. It does not lie with their oppressive culture of state secrecy. It is not about their environmental devastation of holy mountains and forests. It lies, we are being asked to believe, with a non-violent man of peace who has only promoted compromise. They are attempting to scapegoat the Dalai Lama. But it’s laughable – I suspect even to the Chinese people, who have more access to the Internet – although even this is state-controlled. Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies, at St. Antony’s college in Oxford said the following in a Globe and Mail editorial, indicating that he intuitively grasps the connection between the drama of what’s going on in Tibet as having spiritual parallel with the Christian narrative:

 

“…the Dalai Lama represents, dare I say, incarnates, the path of non-violence and negotiation…” (What We Can Do for Suffering Tibet: Globe and Mail, Thursday, March 20, 2008)

 

The gospel stories are written in such a way that by the time the crucifixion narrative comes along, the reader is fully aware that this crucifixion is unjust. The story that the powers are telling, we realize, is pure political spin. The narrative, up to this point, reveals that Jesus incarnates God’s intentions, and that those who hold power are acting against these intentions. This, says Girard, the ultimate purpose of the Christian faith – to unveil the false claims of the status quo political and religious system by telling the truth from the point of view of the victim, rather than the victor. We can see the slow unfolding of the Creator’s intention in the way that China, 2000 years later, is fooling nobody. The scapegoating mechanism no longer works to maintain the status quo. Beginning with the story of Christ’s crucifixion, history increasingly began to be seen through the eyes and the life experience of the victims. The emperor is revealed as wearing no clothes. The naked truth is revealed. The powers and the principalities crucify love. And more and more people are seeing this clearly.

 

I see this crucifixion narrative being played out in the U.S. elections to a lesser degree. As it becomes clear that Barack Obama’s agenda of hope and unity is resonating with the American public, the powers begin to conspire to metaphorically crucify him - the powers being the media conglomerates, the health insurance corporations, the Republican Party, and sadly even the democratic supporters of Hilary Clinton. So they trot out film clips of Obama’s minister speaking out against the history of state terrorism of the American Empire, and the history of the oppression of the blacks in the U.S. – speaking out admittedly from a place of anger, not the carefully measured rhetoric required of a political campaign – about a history that America doesn’t care to be reminded of anymore than we care to be reminded of our history of oppression of the indigenous people. Hope and unity will, I’m afraid, end up crucified as the truth that nobody wants to face is unveiled. Obama is closer to the victims of history than any of the other candidates, and as he speaks out on their behalf, the system will use any means at its disposal to silence him – in the name of  “good order”.

 

This fear of love and justice in many of our social, political, economic and religious organizations is part of the historical process of change. Crucifixion, whether on a literal or metaphorical level, is part of the evolutionary process. It is part of what Paul went when he said that we must die with Christ in order to be raised with Christ. So, even on Good Friday, it is important to remember that Good Friday is always a prelude to Easter. We can expect that the old militaristic, chauvinistic cultures of command and control in a country like China will some day fall. The spirit within the Chinese people will rise up and outgrow this culture. And if it’s not Obama who initiates the fall of outmoded, neo-imperialist, patriarchal definitions of American identity, someone else will soon follow in his footsteps – because this mode of governing and the institutions that reflect this culture are fast becoming dinosaurs. The American people know that the one earth community cannot be sustained by principles that privilege the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and the left-behinds. The one earth community is rising up, with Christ, and our leaders will have no choice but to follow. This is where Spirit is leading us. You can try to kill love, but it will rise up. You can silence the song of hope, but not for long.  You can crucify justice. But like love and hope, justice is of the Spirit, and the Spirit will not stay long in the grave.

 

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