Connecting the Cross and the Lynching Tree

And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” And they cried out again, “Crucify him.” And Pilate said to them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

- Mark 15:12-15, ESV

“What was this Negro's crime that he should be hung without trial in a dark forest filled with fog?  Was he a thief?  Was he a killer?  Or just a Negro?”

- James Farmer, Jr., The Great Debaters [2007]

Just as Jesus is crucified in Mark 15 for being who he was, a great number of executed black people in America have also been guilty of the same innocent deed.  However, it is arguable that we as Americans have not been quick to understand that this similarity exists between the Jesus who has been esteemed among us and the black individuals who have been despised.    

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James H. Cone finds an unmistakable connection between the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified and the tree on which black bodies have been hanged (Cone xv, 3).  He argues that in America’s act of lynching, citizens should also be able to envision the act which took place on Golgotha, especially if these people are Christians (10, 63).

Similar to the execution of Jesus, the lynching of black people in America was in the hands of a crowd (Cone 4; Mk. 15:12-15, ESV).  As “extra-legal” communal punishment, close to five thousand African Americans were murdered in the “lynching era” that lasted between 1880 and 1940 (3, 30-31).  Yet, as these black men, women, and children were victimized by white supremacists who were more than likely “Christian,” there was an ironic inability to see the act of lynching as one that is just as “barbaric” as the crucifixion that their innocent Savior endured unto death (30-31, 35-36).

Not only did this disconnect between Jesus and lynched black people rest among those who involved themselves in the actual offense.  Cone argues that among American Christians, American theologians failed to articulate the parallelism between the cross and the lynching tree when considering the symbolic and substantial suffering of the former (31, 38, 40-41).  White theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr kept silent for purposes of preservation or out of lack of sympathy (46, 49; 51-52).  Moreover, there were even black ministers who did not communicate the connections between the cross and the lynching tree, thus leaving it to black secular artists and writers to relay what the preacher did not through the works that stemmed from their imaginations (93-94).

Recognizing the shortcomings of people who profess belief in Jesus, Cone appears to assert the need for Christians to stand in the paradox that considers the cross “as the terrible tragedy it was” yet also acknowledges the “liberating joy of eternal salvation” that comes “through faith and repentance” (156).  Moreover, he notes that one must recognize “the message of justice” in the cross that remembers the powerless and the suffering (156-157).  In these practices which remember the cross and find it redemptive, one obtains an imagination that is able to identify how the cross is relevant to a social reality such as lynching, as well as an imagination that can somehow find beauty in such a tragedy through faith and “God’s loving solidarity” with those who suffer (157-158, 162).  Through the ability to imagine in these ways, one is made to understand the significance of the cross to the lynching tree in America (160).  After someone takes up the faithful belief that Jesus became the innocent sufferer on the cross who allowed for salvation to take place for broken people, how does it not become possible to see him as “the ‘first lynchee’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil” (158)?  How does it not become possible for believers in Jesus to sympathize with the “crucified people” of their time as they would with their Jesus (160)?  How is there not a hope for a liberated future or a sign of transcendent “loving solidarity” in the lynching tree as there is one in the cross (161-162; 89)?  It is important that, as Christians in America, we find the relation between the faith we proclaim in Jesus and the reality of the events of Jesus made known in our own social contexts (158).

In the twenty-first century context that is decades removed from the height of lynching, believers and theologians must still use, recover, and discover imaginations that link the Christian faith to social realities such as modern-day lynching and the practice of lynching in our American history.  In light of the current mass imprisonment of black people, as well as the loss of many lives to both hate and race-based violence within recent years, lynching in America is still alive and well (163).  Much like Martin Luther King, Jr., the interpretive black writers and artists who were immersed in a society of constant lynching, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, we must also rise to combat present-day forms of lynching and social injustice through cross-bearing, creativity, protest, and—perhaps most important—our faith in the One who also suffered the punishment of hanging on a tree (81-82, 93-96, 126, 129-130).    

Cone, James H.  The Cross and the Lynching Tree.  Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 2011.

Great Debaters, The.  Directed by Denzel Washington. USA, The Weinstein Company, 2007.  iTunes.