DOGS, CATTLE-PRODDERS, MILITIAS & STRUCTURES
“Let them get their dogs and let them get the hose, and we will leave them standing before their God and the world spattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of their negro brothers. It is necessary to bring these issues to the surface, to bring them out into the open where everybody can see them.”
Martin Luther King said that.
I think he heard it from Jesus a few days or weeks before Jesus completed his eternal walk to his own “Selma”. Thankfully King followed in the steps of others before him and thankfully he had a great cloud of witnesses walking along with him.
Jesus, because his task was unique, had to walk alone to the place where he would confront the invisible powers made visible in economic, political, national and religious structures. He confronted those visible structures that within the world they built had “good” military or economic or social or religious or nationalist reasons for their decisions. Jesus rejected their good reasons because he rejected the “world” they built.
He did it alone and yet he was not alone. He went in the name of his Holy Father who commissioned him and was ever with him; he went in the name of and for the sake of a countless host of nameless victims of oppression who had gone on before him and he suffered and died in solidarity with them wearing on his head a crown of thorns with a headband on it saying, Everyman [Hebrews 2:9]. In the person of Jesus of Nazareth God Almighty spoke an everlasting “Yes” in favor of the marginalized and humiliated. The “years that the locusts have eaten will be restored” [compare Joel 2:25-26].
He walked to the end of a road that got the name of the “Way of Sorrows” to the place where he exposed a “world” and sentenced it as demonic and satanic; a “world” that crucified God's children [Acts 17:28-29] and finally crucified God who came to it as Jesus of Nazareth [John 1:9-11]. But the crucifixion of this man was not the victory of “the world” that looked like it triumphed over him, making a spectacle of him—it was the triumph of God who by that crucifixion was triumphing over and making a spectacle of “the world” [Colossians 2:15; Galatians 6:14].
But what a way to expose and conquer such a world! Days or weeks before the hanging Jesus said, “Let them bring their whips, their heartless religious leaders with their vested economic interests in the temple, with their schemes to ensure national self-preservation [John 11:49-50]; let them bring their hecklers, their burly military police with their clenched fists that beat men and women senseless and leave children sobbing.
"I’ll leave them standing there spattered with the blood of God [Acts 20:28], with my blood, and reeking with the injustice of it all, with their curses and jeering as they sit and watch me while I die, as they have always done. It’s necessary to bring the evil of this evil out into the open so that everyone can see it for what it is, and it is only here at that place, only in that moment, that the profound evil of evil can finally be seen in fullness. Only when they hang me will all the suffering of all the powerless be seen for what it always was; only in my weakness and vulnerability, only in the injustice that I will endure will the full story of the long history of the plundered and forgotten poor be told by the Holy Father himself through me.
Whether the poor know it or not, whether they have the opportunity to know it or not, I have come, sent by my Father, to say that God has taken sides with the oppressed in any age; the victims of corrupt and corrupting power. The innocent, the righteous, the powerless have generation after generation exposed the malevolent and arrogant powers in their militia, their jackboots and uniforms, their shrewd economic and social structures that are the tools of oppressors. In a few days the world will never be the same for the Story of what will be done will be told and experienced again and again and again down the years.
But not far from here, at the end of a bricked road that leads out to a hill I will be lifted up and I will become the judge and the conqueror of 'the powers'. All who have suffered before me down the centuries, and who have suffered more than I, are not forgotten and in what is to happen to me I mean to make that clear. And all who will suffer after me have my word that in my sharing the injustice they will experience I will be assuring them that I see what is happening and that I will right all the wrongs [Acts 17:31]. My suffering is not the end of the story nor is theirs. It has to be that I will suffer and then rise again and enter into glory and this glory I offer to the ceaselessly hurt of this world. Until I return I will continue to tell and embody my judgment on 'the world' in and through my chosen ones.”
And this is part of what Jesus means when he says those who would follow him must take up their crosses and follow him. His followers, in his name, confirm what he meant by his Cross and they “proclaim” the meaning of that death in their Suppering together each Lord's Day. The “Lord's” day; the day when the triumph of Jesus over “the world” with its structured cruelty was made known.
And this is part of what his followers are doing when in his name they actively oppose the structures that enslave people and keep them enslaved. They are declaring the resurrection of Jesus Christ by acting out their own inner resurrection experience in and through Christ. By faith they embrace the historical truth of His rising and they embrace the meaning of that death and that resurrection in their actions that publicly rehearse the history and significance of those climactic events.
Their opposing injustice and the deeply-rooted schemes of injustice look no more puny and ineffective than a young man dying on the hanging-tree but they act in the name of that young man who one Sunday morning received Almighty God's approval and vindication. Their opposition to “the world” to proclaim liberty to the prisoners, enrichment to the poor, shelter to the homeless and employment to the unemployed and currently unemployable isn't hand-wringing despair but visible prophecy that a day is coming when all wrongs will be righted.
The very existence of the Church, which is the form the risen Lord takes in these days before his personal return [see Colossians 1:18; Ephesians 1:22-23], is a visible witness to Jesus’ exaltation. Its own weakness, its own vulnerability, its own dying and yet its deathless life [2 Corinthians 6:7-10] is a witness to truth that is often difficult to believe.
But the Church with its hands-on involvement in good work and by its good work is a call to those who feel abandoned to gallantly believe and to think noble things of God who will keep his promises in Jesus Christ.
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