Today’s Invitation
Today, we invite you to explore Jesus Christ’s death by way of James Cone’s prophetic meditation on the cross and the lynching tree; engage with the successes and limitations of the American bishops’ attempts to address racism with the help of Bryan Massingale; and embody Cone’s challenge to see the crucifixion as a lynching with the hopes that it helps us see the suffering caused by racism more clearly, with the help of Sister Thea Bowman, Catholics United for Black Lives, and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
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The Cross and the Lynching Tree
In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone puts white supremacy’s terrorizing symbol of the lynching tree into correlation with Christianity’s central symbol of the cross. Known as the originator of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone spent his career writing about the Black experience, but had never before engaged lynching because, as he states in the introduction, it had been too painful. Finally doing so was a wrenching, but ultimately liberating experience for him: “The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross” (xviii).
The central challenge offered by Cone is that we must view Jesus’s crucifixion as a lyching, and we must learn to see Jesus in the lynched black people who are the victims of racial violence. Cone believes that doing so will simultaneously confront two damaging tendencies of the contemporary church:
- The tendency to distance ourselves from the cross of Christ, treating it either as an abstract, spiritual symbol of God’s redemption of our spiritual lives, or as a real historical event, but one that happened once, to Jesus, 2000 years ago.
- The near complete avoidance of meaningful engagement with the violent history of lynching, especially by theologians.
Cone begins with a harrowing overview of the reality of Jim Crow, where whites used lynching as way to constantly reaffirm their own dominance, and to remind African Americans of their “inferiority and powerlessness” (7). Cone describes the chilling reality that there was theological justification for lynching, and that extralegal violence as a means of controlling and terrorizing the Black population “was grounded in the religious belief that America is a white nation called by God to bear witness to the superiority of ‘white over black’”(7).
This theological justification for lynching was met by near total theological silence, even by progressive theologians who were outspoken about racism, such as Reinhold Niebuhr. Cone suggests that guilt, shame, fear, and unwillingness to confront the full truth of white supremacy are the reasons theologians avoided the subject of lynching.
The Black Church, however, innately understood the Christological (meaning relation to Jesus Christ) implications of lyching, which is clear in the Church’s hymns and spirituals. Black religious imagination found solace in the cross, understanding it to be a statement of God’s solidarity with the poor black people on the lynching tree, for “the symbol of the cross spoke to the lives of blacks because the likeness between the cross and the lynching tree created an eerie feeling of mystery and the supernatural” (75). Additionally, the redemption of the cross meant that slavery and the lynching tree do not have the final word about the identity of Black people. Thus, it is no surprise that the Civil Rights Movement emerged out of the Black Church: “It was Jesus’ cross that sent people protesting in the streets, seeking to change the social structures of racial oppression” (28).
Cone also examines the work of artists – Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and others – who made the explicit connection between lynched black people and Jesus on the cross, even as theologians did not. Cone concludes with a powerful meditation on the cross, urging us to open our eyes to Jesus Christ’s lynching, which will simultaneously help us see the cross for what it really is, and bring God’s redemptive power to the suffering caused by racism:
The lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the reenactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. Thus, the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today. The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering – to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor” (Cone, 162-163).
Commentary by Pierre Bourgeois
A Contemplative Exercise
The centerpiece of the Good Friday liturgy is the adoration of the cross, when the congregation processes up to the front of the church to kiss the image of the crucified Christ. This beautiful ritual is sorrowful and solemn, but perhaps has lost some of the horror of the actual historical event of Jesus’s public torture and state execution when, as James Cone reminds us, Jesus’s crucifixion was a lynching – a public act of violence perpetrated by a colonizing Roman power, with the intention of instilling terror.
We invite you this Good Friday to heed James Cone’s exhortation to look at Jesus on the cross and see a lynched person. How many of us who process up the aisle to adore the cross with a heavy but grateful heart also turn away from the image of George Floyd being killed? Or Ahmaud Arbery? Or Philando Castile? Let us bring our brothers and sisters who are the victims of the violence of racism into our prayers, with the hopes that if we see them on Christ’s cross, then we can learn to better see Christ in them.
Know their names: Black people killed by the police in the US
Sister Thea Bowman was an African-American nun who tirelessly strove for racial reconciliation, and successfully brought sorely needed visibility to African-American culture and people in the Catholic Church.
Born in 1937 in Jackson, Mississippi, Bowman converted to Catholicism at age nine. She grew up during Jim Crow and thus had to learn to navigate a world riven by segregation and racism. She also grew up in the heart of “her African-American culture and spirituality, most especially the history, stories, songs, prayers, customs and traditions. Moreover, she was cognizant that God loved and provided for the poor and the oppressed. Her community instructed her, ‘If you get, give – if you learn, teach.’ These life lessons instilled in her an abiding love for God and to be charitable toward those most in need” (“Biography” from www.sister thea bowman.com).
Bowman became a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, the only African American in her community of sisters. Vatican II’s liturgical reforms allowed her to explore African-American heritage and spirituality in the context of her religious life, an exploration which bore fruit for the whole Church when she returned home to become the director of the Office of Intercultural Affairs for the Diocese of Jackson. There she fought against racism and advocated for cultural understanding.
Recognized for her holiness by all who knew her, she died in 1990. In 2018, the U.S. bishops endorsed her cause for sainthood.
Watch her rousing speech to the U.S. Bishops:
https://youtu.be/uOV0nQkjuoA
For more information:
Catholics United for Black Lives (CUBL) was founded as a response to the “tragic and demoralizing social and racial environment of 2020.” It was founded by Black Catholics who “have sought community online as a means to cope with the effects of trauma, loss and frustration” (“About”). CUBL mines the Catholic tradition for resources for resisting racism in society, but also in the Church itself; it recognizes the racism within the Church and seeks to use the solidarity found in community to push the Church to live up to its own values and to better apply its own social teaching to Black lives. They offer support and resources to Catholic ministers, activists, and other gadflys who are interested in sharing their mission:
We are faithful Eucharistic Catholics who wish to evangelize the gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of our beloved Church. We hold to a consistent life ethic, and will work through direct action and evangelization to advance the dignity, sacredness, and value of every black life from conception to natural death with no exceptions (“About”).
Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is one of the great American songs of the 20th century. Written in the midst of Jim Crow and first sung in 1939, it is as unsettling and powerful a protest song as has ever been written, unnervingly poetic as it describes a lynching. In the effort to feel closer to Christ on the cross this Good Friday, “Strange Fruit” would be a fitting and effective place to start. James Cone comments in The Cross and the Lynching Tree:
Just as the old slave spiritual ‘Were You There?’ placed black Christians at the foot of Jesus’s cross, ‘Strange Fruit’ put them at the foot of the lynching tree. Both songs created a dark and somber mood. One was sung in a church and the other in a nightclub, but both addressed the deep-down hurt that blacks felt and gave them a a way to deal with it…Billie’s ‘Strange Fruit’ elicits reverence for the dead from blacks and terrible guilt from whites who still reap privileges from the society that lynching created” (137, 138).