Cherishing the Old Rugged Cross
There is a line in the song, “The Old Rugged Cross,” that hooked me every time I heard my Nunu (my grandma) sing it. I remember her singing, “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross…The emblem of suffering and shame.” Growing up in a community that told me I was to avoid suffering and overcome pain, I naturally questioned what kind of God would embrace such an emblem. I could never quite figure out a God who would willingly submit to the cruelties of human “justice.” But I think that is the point. When we look at Calvary, we see the murder of God. We see the murder of innocence. Perhaps we have become so desensitized to the scandal of the cross that we are comfortable rationalizing the execution of God, but we would do well to look again at “The Old Rugged Cross” during these times of social unrest.
As Christians, we confess that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Yet when the world is presented with the incarnation of love and justice, we respond with the “emblem of suffering and shame.” The very act of murdering God by torturous crucifixion reveals the foolishness of our human justice system and way of life. In other words, what does it say about our notions of “justice” and “peace” when we are compelled to murder Love? The death of Christ is no celebration, but rather, it is the condemnation of our capacity to legitimize and sanction the arrest, torture, and killing of innocent life.
Through the cross, God has rejected our ways of domination, coercion, and execution. James Cone writes, “The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.” God has chosen those at the margins to redeem the world, for those at the margins have the most to teach us about love. Of course, God could have chosen a Roman emperor on a white horse to conquer the world, but instead, God chose to become a poor, brown-skinned carpenter from Nazareth to suffer and die the death of a criminal. In God’s willingness to live and die with the oppressed, we see that God has chosen the poor and powerless, not the armed and dangerous. For in a Roman world that said otherwise, Jesus hanging from a cross is God’s declaration that “Poor, Jewish Lives Matter.” God is not interested in the power, privilege, and resources of the 99 sheep who claim, “All Lives Matter.” God is interested in finding, loving, and liberating the one sheep whom the world has rejected.
I invite you to consider Matthew 25:45. It reads, “Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’” If we confess that Jesus mattered but are unwilling to listen to the crucified ones of our own day, then we prove ourselves to be hypocrites who are more concerned with having a “form of godliness” rather than an authentic, self-giving faith (2 Timothy 3:5). The entire Christian tradition is built upon the life and words of a man who seemed insignificant enough to His world that He was crucified without cause. Don’t make the same mistake as those at Pilate’s hall crying out, “Crucify Him!” Listen to those who have been silenced by the force of privilege and power.
After listening to and learning from black voices, Jesus, first, urges us to confess our complicity in preserving the white supremacy that stains our nation. Until we confess our cultural and national sins (slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, red lining, mass incarceration, and the list goes on and on), we will never find healing…neither within ourselves nor in our nation. If you’ve been avoiding confession by responding to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” I invite you to consider why a statement affirming the dignity and value of black lives provokes a defensive posture. Simply, why are you already assuming that “Black Lives Matter” is at odds and in opposition to “All Lives Matter?” Howard Thurman argues, “When hatred serves as a dimension of self-realization, the illusion of righteousness is easy to create.” Perhaps we, as poor, white hillbillies, have yet to reckon with our own cultural fears and insecurities and thus, need to “other” our black siblings as a means of feeling a sense of significance and self-worth (a blog post for another time).
Second, Jesus urges us to repent of our roles and complicity in white supremacy, and as I’ve heard a thousand times in sermons, repentance requires action. It is time we educate ourselves about racism and America’s dark history of racial violence and injustice. It is time we venture out of the echo chambers of white perspectives we inhabit every day and follow our black siblings in the ways of freedom. It is time we join in marches and protests, fighting for a world where God’s will is done here as it is in Heaven. This most definitely is not an exhaustive list, but it is a starting place for those who have long resisted the coming of God’s kingdom.
In summation, if you truly want to cherish “The Old Rugged Cross,” I encourage you to choose the God of Jesus who protested our brutality through cruciform love. God does not meet the hurting with fatigues, a badge, or a gun. God meets the hurting with scars and open arms. Our black siblings carry four hundred years of physical and emotional scars that we, white people, have neglected, ignored, and intensified for far too long. While we will never know the immense pain our black siblings have endured, I know the “unsophisticated hillbilly” to be familiar with rejection and exclusion as well. By no means do we carry the same burden as our black siblings, but we carry our own cultural pain. Because we share a common brokenness, we also share a common liberation. If we can learn to struggle together, I believe that we will be free together.