WIT

Today we commemorate the passion and death of Jesus. In doing so we inevitably reflect on the theological significance of the cross and Jesus’ suffering (it is important to remember that Jesus’ death happened through brutal torture and execution under the Roman Empire). Although the gospels present Jesus as going freely and deliberately, even attributing salvific significance to his death, we are still left with the troubling “revelation” that God appreciates suffering as somehow saving human beings from sin. Yet, as Edward Schillebeeckx notes in his Christ book, “God does not want human beings to suffer.” Focusing on the suffering of the cross as salvific has the power to sacralize suffering and violence, which is the result of sin and evil, and thus against the will of God.

Yet we are still left with a Christian witness that that does place important value on the cross. How are we to understand this? Jon Sobrino’s theology of the cross rejects the idea that suffering itself is salvific, focusing rather on Jesus’ solidarity with human suffering in his own violent crucifixion. (You can find similar reflections on the cross from Katie, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”, and Nichole, “The Pink Cross: Resisting Feminicide in Ciudad Jaurez,”). Similarly, Schillebeeckx writes of the cross,

Jesus’ death is historically the consequence of the radicalism both of his message and life-style, which showed that all master-servant relationships are irreconcilable with the kingdom of God. The death of Jesus is the historical expression of the unconditional character of his proclamation and life-style, in the light of which the importance of the fatal consequences for his own life faded completely into the background. Jesus’ death was suffering through and for others as the unconditional force of a life-style of doing good and opposing evil and suffering (God Among Us, 109-110)

The Christa is an expression of this solidarity—in this case with the suffering of women. The work is a crucifix featuring the figure of a woman. Here, we are presented with an artistic representation of Christ’s solidarity with women, who, throughout the tradition, have been held not to be in the image of God or able to represent Christ (see Inter Insigniores). Through the cross Christ enters into the suffering of women—women who have been persecuted by the Christian churches as witches, women who have been brutalized by intimate partner violence, women who have been verbally and psychologically abused and assaulted, women who have suffered forms of sexual violence, women who bear most of the burden of global poverty, women who are spiritually oppressed in the church. (For a recent post on sexual violence, see Julia’s “Violence, Memory, and Mourning”). All of us are called to enter into solidarity resistance and of the structural and cultural sins (sexism and those that intersect with sexism, such as racism, classism, etc) and that makes us more vulnerable to violence.

Yet, just as we wait in hopeful anticipation for the resurrection of Christ on Easter, so too we hope for the resurrection of all the crucified throughout history: We hope that God does not allow for evil to have the final word.