They Always Crucify the Innocent
If you think the cross is about saving people from hell in the next life, you’ll miss how crosses are still being raised in this one.
When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left.
—Luke 23:33
Although I have deconstructed my evangelical faith, the cross still unsettles and captivates me.
It is a uniquely powerful religious symbol, perhaps because it is intimately tied to the worst of what humans can do to one another. Before it was the most recognizable religious symbol in the world, it was a symbol of political violence and imperial terrorism.
Perhaps it is precisely because it embodies the worst cruelties of the human imagination that it has such a grip on our collective consciousness. If God could redeem this murderous, torturous thing, then surely there is no power of death that cannot be overcome by love.
And yet, for many of us, the story we were told about the cross no longer works. It was a transactional story—Jesus’s death paying off a debt humanity owed to a punishing God. I’m not going to dismantle that story here (you can preorder my book for that!), but I want to offer one alternative—not the only one, but one worth considering.
The crucifixion of Jesus shows us where we can find God.
God is with the victims.
Jesus was not killed to satisfy a bloodthirsty God, but a bloodthirsty empire. It is not God who demands blood. It’s always us. Just look around. Just look at history.
One tragic pattern throughout history is the way groups create enemies that do not exist. Philosopher and anthropologist René Girard calls this the scapegoat mechanism: majority groups select a marginalized group to blame for society’s problems—real or imagined—leading to exclusion and violence.
The Nazis scapegoated Jews. Southern whites did it to Black people. Today, many conservatives scapegoat immigrants crossing the southern border, accusing them of “stealing jobs.”
This tribal mindset creates in-group cohesion through a shared enemy. It happens over and over again.
We always crucify the innocent.
In this sense, the story of the cross is not unique.
But the power of the cross is that the violence of the world is not only seen by God—it is experienced by God.
Christian doctrine teaches that Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us.”
The cross shows us that God’s “with-ness” goes to the lowest places our inhumanity reaches.
In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann writes, “There is no loneliness and no rejection which [God] has not taken to himself and assumed in the cross. There is no cry of the oppressed which he has not heard, and no pain which he has not felt.”
I believe the most vivid modern allegory of the cross is the lynching tree of the white supremacist South.
Theologian James Cone draws this parallel in The Cross and the Lynching Tree:
Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists— the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. . . . In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place.
Black artists and thinkers recognized the parallel between lynching and crucifixion, even when white theologians did not.
In 1916, the NAACP’s The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, published a haunting etching titled Christmas in Georgia, depicting a Black man being lynched while Christ surrounds and upholds him. Christ says: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, My brethren, ye did it unto Me.”
It must not be ignored that the white mobs who hoisted innocent black bodies for ritual murder were Christians—worshipers of a white Christ, singing songs of heavenly salvation while they recrucified Christ on earth.
But as Cone writes, “If the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history.”
The message of the cross is clear: God is not on the side of the powerful—Christian or otherwise. God is on the side of the suffering. God is with the scapegoats.
On the cross, Jesus joins the scapegoats of history and exposes the brutality of our systems of domination.
When Jesus invites us to take up our crosses, he is calling us to stand with those the world is trying to destroy.
As Fr. Greg Boyle puts it, “Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified—whichever came first.”
The cross shows us what the kingdoms of this world do: they scapegoat and crucify, especially those on the margins—and those who dare to stand with them.
The resurrection shows us what God does: God sides with the victims of history, and brings life out of death.
Queer therapist Matthias Roberts, raised in conservative evangelicalism, saw the scapegoat mechanism firsthand in how his church blamed queer people for society’s decline.
The Bible says very little about gay people—actually nothing, when you consider that its authors had no concept of queerness as we understand it today. And yet queer people bear the brunt of conservative Christian hostility. This is scapegoating.
Roberts was denied his humanity within evangelicalism, but found in the gospel that Jesus was not aligned with the power structures. Jesus was with him—in his queerness, in his exclusion.
Roberts came to see the cross and resurrection as hopeful signs that God is with the scapegoats. One piece of evidence, he says, is that “victims and scapegoats are being listened to more now than ever before in all human history.” That is good news. That is resurrection.
In 2024, Easter fell on March 31—International Transgender Day of Visibility.
This infuriated many Christians, who saw it as a threat to their celebration of Jesus. But I believe honoring trans people is fully aligned with the meaning of Easter.
That the world is choosing to see trans people, to listen and bear witness, is evidence of the arc of history moving toward justice. The Spirit of the living Christ is at work!
But the struggle is far from over.
Trans siblings are being scapegoated globally. They are being crucified.
Despite making up just 1% of the population, they are routinely blamed for everything from child abuse to economic collapse. Former President Trump even had the audacity to suggest that America is no longer a wealthy nation because of trans people, saying: “We had so much wealth… Wouldn’t it be nice today? Of course, now we give it away to transgender this, transgender that. Everybody gets a transgender operation.”
To pin our nation’s financial struggles on a vulnerable minority would be laughable—if it weren’t so deadly.
In the U.S., trans people are two and a half times more likely to experience violence than cis people. The number of trans people murdered has doubled in recent years—disproportionately Black trans women.
And instead of compassion, our nation is responding with a legislative assault. In 2024 alone, 691 bills across 43 states were introduced to strip trans people of basic rights and dignity.
If you think the cross and resurrection are mainly about keeping people out of hell in the next life, you’ll miss how crosses are still being raised in this one.
I am absolutely convinced that if Jesus were walking the earth today, he would draw especially near the trans community—showing love, acceptance, and solidarity.
He would go to the cross fighting for them.
And now, as the body of Christ, that’s what we’re called to do.
This is the haunting beckon of Good Friday: to show up where crosses are going up, and to stand with those being nailed to them.
A prayer practice of the church is ‘Visio divina,’ in which you meditate on an image and pray. Consider praying this breath prayer as you meditate on the image above, shared from The Crisis magazine in 1916.
Inhale: Empire crucifies the innocent
Exhale: Jesus is amongst them
PAUSE
Inhale: God is with the victims
Exhale: And I will stand there too
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Brian, thank you. Your interpretation of the Gospels (and your reframing of the Easter story) is the one I can still get behind and it speaks to me, when most other voices no longer do.
Thanks so much for this well-written expression of the Divine standing with the oppressed. As a preacher's kid myself, I've always had a hard time with the idea of "appeasing an angry God" as a reason for the Crucifixion. I once had an experience in a labyrinth walk where I came to the epiphany that my dad was a better father than the God that he preached - that if we heard of a neighbor who treated his children the way we were saying God treats us, we'd call in Child Protective Services. No - God is Love, and God stands with and holds the oppressed (and the oppressors, though not their actions) in love. Thank you, Brian, for naming this so clearly.