The Cross and the Lynching Tree

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ - Matthew 25:44-45

Those verses always pack a punch. They are easy to instill guilt. They are easy to protect ourselves from. It just hurts too much to face them head on.

But what if we dived even deeper in to the discomfort? What if we made it even more contemporary, more incisive, instead of less? Listen in the renowned theologian James Cone as he reflects on what it means that Christ identifies so closely with those who are marginalized. As you read, let the Spirit speak to you.

When we encounter the crucified Christ today, he is a humiliated black Christ, a lynched black body. Christ is black not because black theology said it. Christ is made black through God's loving solidarity with lynched black bodies and divine judgement against the demonic forces of white supremacy. Like a black naked body swinging on a lynching tree, the cross of Christ was "an utterly offensive affair," "obscene in the original sense of the word," "subjecting the victim to the utmost indignity." - James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree