Why I Keep in Mind a Painful Death

Recently I discovered a disturbing web site: www.withoutsanctuary.org. It documents postcards of lynchings in earlier times in America, most of the victims black. The scenes printed for mass distribution depict gut-wrenching brutality and obvious signs of torture leading up to the hangings. Just as striking is the nonchalance of the perpetrators, and the fact that the photographs, some capturing a carnival atmosphere with children present, became postcard “souvenirs,” a grotesque testimony to the way humans can grossly dehumanize one another.

My discovery of the unspeakable atrocities coincided with something that has come back to mind, during this season of Lent. I recalled a sermon about the cross of Christ I heard a few years ago. The preacher reminded those of us present how Jesus’ crucifixion didn’t just mean excruciating, mind-exploding pain; this whole method of execution someone seemed perversely designed to deny and erase the humanity of the accused.

Part of that has to do with how, much like American lynchings, the torture of the cross was drastically obvious. “The public display of a crucified one represented the utmost humiliation,” writes one scholar. “In the ancient honor/shame society such an end would signal a human being reduced to nothingness. It was not only the worst of Roman punishments, but also drove all to forget the one liquidated. … Crucifixion … pushed – with every last breath – the condemned into oblivion.”

Romans employed this horrible way to die to effect an erasure—obliterating not only the victim’s worth, but others’ very memory of the person. For crucifixion traumatized those witnessing the death, supplanting in their recollections utmost horror. That means of death so disgraced a loved one as to wipe out any reason to keep him in mind. It drove the one remembering the person to repel what would now be overwhelmingly painful memories.

But something else, wildly different, happened with Jesus’ crucifixion. Yes, his suffering passion and squeezed-out, stolen breath and agonized cry reduced his friends to sorrowing disbelief. But only for a time. And yes, even Jesus himself, in some profound paradox, cried his forsakenness out to his Father-God whom he had known with deepest intimacy.

But only for a time. Jesus was not ultimately God-forsaken. In some difficult-to-fathom way, the intimacy of Father and Son would now actually take on new depth. Instead of driving him from memory and beloved recollection, this death began to endear Jesus even more. For it was a sign not of forsakenness and erasure, but sacrificial love. The trauma became transmuted into a story of amazing news, of astonishing grace.

Holy Week is not far from view as I write. I sometimes feel a quiet somberness in this season of Lent with its starkness. But also, running even deeper, a profounder joy. A certainty that even death need not rob us of knowing that we are loved. That amid horrific suffering, smack in the middle of what worries me most, a presence abides.