I CRUCIFIED GEORGE FLOYD:

Jesus was lynched. To hear that word applied to Jesus is shocking, first because the cross has been sanitized in our imagination and turned into a religious symbol. We don't often think of it as an act of mob violence supported by government and religious authorities. But second, I think it is shocking to hear that Jesus was lynched because it makes you wonder why such an obvious way to describe what happened to Jesus has never been used in American churches. Twice in the book of Acts, the apostolic preachers say that Jesus was "hanged on a tree," and Paul takes the old law that says anyone hanging on a tree is cursed to make the point that Jesus bore the curse for us. But it never crossed our minds that Jesus was like "strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

When the black theologian James Cone died recently, I was moved to read his last book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree [Orbis, 2011], in which he points out that no white theologians or preachers, and almost no black ones, made a comparison between what happened to Jesus and what happened to at least 4,000 black men, women, and children. Once you juxtapose those two images in your mind--once you see the man hanging on the old rugged cross next to a man hanging from a regular tree for everyone to gawk at--it's hard not to see lynchings as 19th and 20th century crucifixions. I think the juxtaposition deepens our reflections on the cross.

Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists--the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place.

We like to think that if we were in Jerusalem, we would have stood up for Jesus, but the truth is it's not bloody likely. And we like to think that if we were in the South in the period 1882-1968 when lynchings occurred, we would have tried to stop them, but honestly, how likely is that?

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