I still remember rather vividly the O. J. Simpson case back in 1994. The former NFL football player and television personality was accused of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.
On June 17 of that year, Simpson refused to surrender to the authorities and led the Los Angeles police department on a low-speed chase in his white Ford Bronco, and did so for about 60 miles of southern California freeways.
The chase itself was televised live on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. An astonishing 95 million people watched it live! It was the highest-rated television broadcast of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl!
Back then, an NPR commentator captured an insight about that moment that seems to have become truer over the decades. Reflecting on the Simpson case—the car chase and the infamous trial that followed—the commentator noted how we have become “audienced,” rendered as passive observers by our media-drenched culture.
That passivity has only become exponentially worse since then: the advent of the Internet, and smart phones, and social media make it nearly impossible now not to be merely an audience. As we scroll through online reels, we might come across a clip of a stand-up comic in one moment and with a simple swipe, we are watching horrific episodes of genocide happening in real time, right there, on our little screens.
It’s hard to say whether our technology has changed us or whether we just have new tools to do what humans have always done. We might recall Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014—he was shot by a police officer, who simply stood there and watched him bleed out and die, and many of us watched him do that on television.
Or we might go farther back to the era of Jim Crow segregation and the practice of lynching. Some of those violent episodes took place at church picnics, of all things, when faithful churchgoers shared food at picnic tables while “strange fruit,” as some have called those Black bodies, were hanging from nearby trees.
We can certainly go much farther back, recalling that early Christians described the Cross of Christ as a “tree” and the body of Jesus as its fruit, his blood watering the roots.
Is that how the street mob thought about it, the ones calling for the death of Jesus? Is that how the cohort of religious leaders thought about it? What about the disciples?
What kind of meaning do we make from the violence we witness? Whom do we hold responsible for the violence we witness? When do we cease witnessing and become “audienced”? What kind of people are in that shift? Who, then, have we become?
Public theologian Jon Paul Syndor has recently referred to these times in which we live as an age of “performative cruelty”: children ripped from their parents’ arms by government officials, immigrants warehoused in filthy detention camps, tens of thousands of children buried in the rubble of Gaza, hospitals and schools targeted for bombing—the violence of our age is stark, gripping, and dismaying.
How, Syndor wonders, do so many religious leaders, most of them Evangelical Christians, support such cruelty, visibly and vocally? Why would they ever do so?
Syndor is convinced it’s because of their religious interpretation of the Cross of Christ; they firmly believe that the death-by-torture of Jesus is the means by which God saves us, and so violence will continue to save us today.
That ostensibly pious supposition sounds traditional and even biblical, but I have become convinced that it is instead just bad theology; and bad theology is deadly.
To be clear, I do believe that the cross of Jesus Christ is a symbol of blessing and divine salvation; but I do not believe that God ever uses violence as the means to save anyone or anything. To the contrary, God is committed to saving us from violence, not with violence.
In today’s world of unrelenting violence it is all the more imperative for religious people to be very careful—especially religious people—not even to appear to embrace or endorse violence as a means to an end; as human history shows time and time again, religious faith adds a dimension of justification for the most brutal actions. So we must be as clear as possible about this instead: brutality and torture cannot heal us or anyone; there is nothing soothing, healing, or saving about brutality, whether we commit it ourselves, watch it being done by others, or proclaim it as religious doctrine.
We must never imagine God as violent lest we ourselves embody violence itself.
In my western Michigan parish along the Lake Michigan shoreline, we include an opportunity in our Good Friday liturgy to venerate an image of the Cross of Christ. The cross we use for that purpose is made from driftwood found on the beach near where the sanctuary sits—a tangible reminder that God is committed to saving us from violence not only in first-century Judea but also right here, today.
That moment of veneration must include, I believe, a commitment to stand firm in a shared rejection of violence, and to say clearly, in both word and action, every single day and at every moment we can, that violence will not save us.
What is soothing, and healing, and yes, saving, is the God who joins us in our pain and confusion, who stands with us in our foolishness and tragic missteps, the one who dwells among us and travels with us all the way to the cross, and from there to lead us through it toward a bright day of new life.
Christians are never an “audience” in our religious sanctuaries; we are rather witnesses and participants in an ongoing and still unfolding story of God’s own solidarity with us, and how this story shapes us to set aside our violent tendencies, and our brutal nightmares of vengenance, and even our petty resentments that can fester into bitter hositilities. Set all of that aside as we witness the Cross of Christ among us and live in deep solidarity with others, with the vulnerable, with the wounded, and the forgotten.
And that is how God saves, and that is what the Cross means: gracious accompaniment; tender presence; and bold solidarity.
