THE GOSPEL OF THE CROSS – TRUTH, SOLIDARITY, AND POWER

Christ hanging over the City of Rafah, Gaza, which was destroyed by Israeli bombardment in 2025. Aerial View Source: IG/ @eye.on.palestine. Christ figure adapted from ‘Christo Morto’ statuette: After Giambologna (1529-1608)

By Violet White

‘I prefer a painful reality over any blissful fantasy’ – Chelsea Manning, Chat Logs May 2010    

The symbol at the heart of the Christian faith is a vicious instrument of imperial execution. But in a world devastated by cynicism and manipulation, the impoverishment of the many by the few, and the murderous persecution of oppressed peoples by another iteration of Empire, this gives me hope. Because I really couldn’t stomach ‘any blissful fantasy’. The centrality of the Cross to the Gospel is a powerful and profound statement of reality, solidarity and power, which meets us right where we are.  

Truth, solidarity, and power.

So much of what we have to fight is obfuscation. The gaslighting with endless straw men. The parallel narrative with a superficial relationship to some of the facts. And these days, so many blatant lies as well. The crucifixion of Jesus tells the unvarnished truth with no gloss; it strips away subterfuge and pretence.

In the Cross I see God judging oppression by becoming its victim and demonstrating that, despite this, evil still comes out of that fight empty-handed. Surrendered in total commitment to all the constraints of being human in solidarity with us and crushing the serpent’s head for us in a defining strike. Suffering the inevitable consequence of a mission which refuses to compromise with the power of oppression and is engaged in unmasking it. God in Christ is on the cross and the other side of that equation is revealed as the obsessive destruction of goodness, exposing for all time the quintessential nature of evil and amplifying Jesus’ revolutionary message and mission, endorsing it as faithful and true – even to the death.

And God in Christ hangs on that Cross in solidarity with all who are oppressed, victim of those same forces of oppression; it’s all here, vindicating and holding us in our suffering by unambiguously acknowledging the horror, grief and pain.

Solidarity is love; it’s fellowship, comradeship, even joy. Immanuel, we say at Christmas – God With Us – the Cross is God with us at our most assaulted by evil. So much pain. So much injustice. So much horror. And God’s very own self walking into that same firestorm in solidarity with us cuts it for me.

In the persecution of Jesus, the two contrasting types of power – the true – as exemplified in Jesus – and the counterfeit – in the form of the authorities that put him to death – lock horns and battle it out through the Passion in the perennial warfare which characterises life on earth and in which we are all parties, whether we like it or not.

God’s Word on Judgment

In its plain truth-telling and centrality to the Gospel, the Cross both warns and reassures that there is no route to redemption and deliverance for the oppressor but through the truth; through the validation of the oppressed and the exposure of the oppression. So, among other things, the Cross is God’s Word to us on Judgment.

This has been an unfashionable concept, but in times of unbridled evil, judgment is something we long for and understand. Aside from vengeance, punishment or even consequences (separate considerations and ones weighed in the light of other factors, the strangest of which is surely Jesus saying “Father, forgive them” in his dying moments), judgment in this sense is simply the exposure and stating of the truth, the coming out of denial and the vindicating of the victim.

The entirely innocent die at the hand of those responsible for good governance, yet who systematically practice evil in high places. Religious and national rulers, lawyers, academics, state and empire all conspire in this crime, together with as many of the people as they can con, bribe or coerce into supporting them. And the behaviour of that hydra is replicated all over our world in how it oppresses.

18,000 children slaughtered in a year and a half by the State of Israel in collaboration with our Western governments, perpetuated by our media and institutions, including religious –– all heavily populated, controlled or directed by the rich and the super-rich; the keyholders of this world’s power.

The weaponisation of scripture itself is as old as forever; the religious authorities did it in Jesus’ time and practically every oppression since has been theologised by oppressors to their own advantage. And now the State of Israel is cloaked with a Biblical caricature of Godly superiority.

Except all those children tear the lie to shreds in full view of the whole world. Even as the powers that be scramble to maintain it.

And regardless of all the insistent messaging to the contrary, there is no room for dispute. Of course it’s genocide; of course it’s evil. The plain truth is in full view, as it was on the Cross. You can’t murder children and not be committing a heinous act, any more than you can murder God (or God’s representative) and not be committing a heinous act. And anyone with eyes to see can see it. Truth matters. Judgment matters. And Jesus says:‘The light of the body is the eye; keep your eye sound’.

Authority meets Power: ‘He taught them as one having authority, not as the Scribes and Pharisees’

Jesus is hunted down at night by officials of the religious establishment with an armed body of guards. They’ve been sent to arrest him before, but hearing him speak to the people, were themselves captivated by him, drifting lamely back empty-handed to those who’d sent them, explaining: “never man spake like this man”.

Authority meets authority; power comes up against power. And in a contest where the odds are not stacked, it couldn’t be simpler: ‘the common people heard him gladly because he taught them as one having authority, not as the Scribes and Pharisees’. This authority needs no embellishment, no props, weapons, walls, wealth to shore it up; it stands on its own terms and has the ring of truth. ‘Deep calls to deep’; it cuts straight through all the crap we’ve been subjected to or compromised by and bonds with our suppressed humanity, bringing us to life, because it derives from Love; the ultimate and original.

Its opposite number is a power and authority that, stripped of its paraphernalia, is devoid of influence, because the power it wields is solely derived from that paraphernalia. Motivated by self-aggrandisement, it operates by threat and force. And those who are the least invested in the systems of oppression characterising the counterfeit power hear the truth most gladly, and those who have the most credit in that system do not.

This time they’ll go to arrest Jesus at dead of night, when there are no crowds. They’ll take an armed posse, to make sure they look as threatening as possible.

Dissent, Protest and Crackdown

And it’s always the same. It’s the counterterror police banging on the door before anyone’s awake, completely unnecessary hordes of them using completely unnecessary force to detain one perfectly peaceful individual who’s been openly speaking truth to power; doing some actual journalism.

Or around 30 of them unnecessarily breaking into a Quaker Meeting House (What, ring the bell? Don’t be daft…) and absurdly searching it room by quiet room, arresting six young people at a publicly advertised meeting – non-violent civically engaged young people (that’s supposed to be a good thing, right?) discussing how they should respond to the evils of our time. This is the nature of State oppression; their insecurity requires them to take a battalion to a banner-holder. A mob to a meeting. Such is their fear of dissent. Same old fake authority that can’t stand on its own terms.

And the worse the ills the authorities are steeped in, the worse their response to anyone calling them to account. “No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory” (Paul Parker – Quakers in Britain). Ah, but now the British State are colluding in a genocide and so that ups the ante…   

Timeline from Youth Demand

When they arrive mob-handed in the dead of night to seize him, Jesus points out that he hasn’t been in hiding; they’ve had ample time and opportunity to arrest him; he’s been speaking openly, making no attempt to hide his message. When he overturned the tables of the moneylenders right there in the Temple for instance; or when he went on to tell successive parables warning the religious elite their corruption would result in them being deposed by God; or when he was openly calling them:

blind guides/ hypocrites/ extortioners/
whitewashed sepulchres full of dead bones/
serpents; a brood of vipers

…and much more. When we’re told to be more polite, more civil, or less disruptive in our protest against the egregious ills of our society, we might remember that these are not polite words. And turning over the moneylenders’ tables and driving them out of the temple is obviously a physically disruptive and, at the very least, hugely contentious action threatening the established order where it most hurts. 

But the message is gaining traction because people are realising the liberating truth being so dramatically and authentically presented. And this is precisely when they step up the harassment, so take heart because it’s then you really know you’re cutting through.

Sham Justice: Kangaroo Courts and Show Trials

Ten of Palestine Action’s Filton 18 – some of the young people who’ve taken direct action against the Gaza genocide and been denied bail for months. Photo from FREE THE FILTON 18 poster

We’re seeing young people arrested by counter-terror police for non-violent direct action against genocide – a cynical manoeuvre to paint them as terrorists and allow for normal due process to be suspended – but then not charged under terror legislation (because, as was already perfectly clear, they’re not terrorists but protesters). Denied bail for months and ongoing as a form of pretrial punishment because they’ve been so effective.

Judges – frustrated because juries were constantly declaring protesters innocent on a public interest defence – preventing evidence of either motivation or public interest; a draconian hobbling of the right to a fair trial.

Jesus is hauled off in the dead of night to endure a multi-pronged show trial (replete with a hastily assembled ‘court of public opinion’ – rent-a-mob assets screaming for his blood) from the religious court to the court of Empire – which juggles him between jurisdictions and finally accedes to the demands of the religious leaders for the death sentence.

The guards who’ve arrested Jesus, knowing he’s seen as a prophet, now gather round him and amuse themselves by blindfolding, slapping and punching him, yelling: “Prophesy! Who hit you?” while they wait for the arrival of the religious Council, comprising the court for his first trial.

This is the ruling hierarchy of his own national and religious heritage. It is a community dominated by an oppressive religious elite who are riddled with contempt for the people supposedly in their cure, and which has literally been out to get him since he preached his first sermon. So Jesus takes the revolutionary words in Isaiah and applying them prophetically to that moment and himself – infuriating them further by illustrating (from their own Scriptures) that their status was not entitlement; God cares for all humanity (whereupon they tried to throw him over the cliff):

The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me To preach good news to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed

In the Council, they’re looking for the death penalty on a charge of sacrilege, a supreme irony given what they’re doing. ‘Witnesses’ twist things he’s said, but their ‘testimony’ is contradictory. Jesus asks them which of his good deeds they have arrested him for. They refuse to answer, so he doesn’t respond to them either, until they ask him directly: “Are you the Son of God?” To which he replies: “You said it”. And the High Priest cries “Blasphemy!” ritually tearing his garments and challenging the court to arrive at the ‘correct’ verdict: “You’ve heard him yourselves, now! What’s your decision?” And they duly deliver.

Under Roman rule, they can’t put Jesus to death, so they drag him off to the Roman governor (Pontius Pilate), who, after some questioning of Jesus which obviously mystifies him, tries to pass the buck by sending him to Herod Antipas (who’d previously had John the Baptist beheaded), Rome’s client ruler of Jesus’ home region, visiting the area. This mends the difficult relationship between the two governors, and they become allies. But it doesn’t progress anything with respect to Jesus, beyond being viciously abused by another set of soldiers, then passed back to the first governor.

After some half-hearted attempts to free Jesus, (who he believes is innocent), Pilate has his mind changed by expedience, having been carefully assisted to perceive an incipient threat to his own position – amplified by a bawling mob, looking ominously like an impending riot, who’ve been bribed to cry “Crucify him”. And – literally washing his hands; a performative action of zero efficacy to anyone if ever there was one – he delivers Jesus up to his own soldiers as a morsel for their amusement and to have him flogged – the standard precursor to crucifixion.            

Torture

The flagellum was a whip with multiple separate thongs, each of which had sharp pieces of bone or metal attached – designed to make a bloody pulp of the body. The soldiers get the entire unit together for this and then stage a mock coronation, piercing him with the barbs of great thorns they twist into a crown and force down onto his head. Throwing a purple robe around his shoulders and giving him a reed staff, they kneel before him in a parody of tribute, crying “Hail, King of the Jews”, tormenting him in his pain, weakness and anguish with the ironic reminder of his triumphant entry into the city the previous week.

Crown Of Thorns. Linoleum block print by Elizabeth Steele Halstead.                          

Guantanamo, Bagram, Sde Teiman. Torture is thriving in the 21^st Century. No-one, absolutely no-one, has ever been held accountable for the criminally-devised (and authorised at the highest level) CIA torture programme – euphemistically tagged ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, with its Black Sites, extraordinary rendition and barbaric physical and psychological torture, including hooding, stripping, sexual abuse and rape, being attacked by dogs, and murder. This is practiced on bounty-hunted Muslims, almost all clearly guilty of nothing at all, held without charge or trial – often for decades – at first in secret, and without access to any legal representation. And some of these men – long cleared of any crime – are still incarcerated in Guantanamo to this day.

Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, an Iraqi tortured at Abu Ghraib      

It’s hardly surprising that the State of Israel tortures, rapes and murders Palestinians in Sde Teiman and elsewhere with absolute impunity.

Crucifixion                                 

Exhausted from sleep deprivation and torture, Jesus is forced to carry the heavy instrument of his own death on his freshly lacerated back as the blood streams down his face and into his eyes from the repeated ripping of the thorns, until he collapses under the great wooden crossbar once too many times and someone is ordered to carry it for him.

On arrival at the Hill of the Skull he has nails hammered through his feet and hands to the wooden upright and crossbar, and the Cross is agonisingly raised and jolted into place for him to die a torturous death of slow suffocation at the hand of the State, isolated from his baffled, disturbed and disillusioned followers (who, despite his telling them in advance that all this would happen and asserting the need for it, are not ready for it, having understandably not grasped the breadth of this struggle), his mourners at the foot of the Cross being just one of his male disciples and four of his female disciples:

The Raising of the Cross, by Sebastiano Mazzoni, commons image

Palm Sunday – less than a week before – when Jesus rode into the city hailed by the crowds as the Messiah – is now a distant memory.

God murdered in ignominy: this is the story

Whether or not you believe, as I do, that Jesus is the Christ and, as a member of the Trinity, God incarnate; nevertheless, this is the story according to the Scriptures. This story is God murdered in ignominy by all the powers of governance, with a rustled-up mob of ‘the people’ cheering them on.

And this story doesn’t have Jesus striding up the hill to Golgotha like he can take it, like he’s all over this, but like he really can’t, like he’s collapsing and it’s a hell he’s not equal to at all. He’s entirely human. He’s fully suffering, as we would. “This is your hour and the power of darkness”, he’d said of the forces he knew were ranged against him as he headed out to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he was arrested.

On Good Friday we have the spectacle of institutional power putting its opponent to death, and claiming victory. Battering, crushing and burying Jesus’ kind of power – the power gladly authenticated by the common people.

Commons image from Vector Portal

The counterfeit cannot bury the true and has neither root nor abiding

But the fact is, this kind of power – rooted in love – is not subject to the power of threat and force. It receives and suffers the pains and privations of force, it is grievously hurt by them, and those who live by it can even be put to death. But it has no root or abiding, is itself subject to the vagaries of circumstance, is based in temporary and arbitrary status and requires a vast panoply of support mechanisms to function at all, its authority a great empty carapace, void of integrity.

Compare this to the figure of Christ on the Cross – in apparent powerlessness, stripped and being crucified. Is this defeat? Why do we – more than 2000 years later – even know the names of the ‘powerful’ rulers who arranged this, their ‘victory’? It is literally only because Jesus was crucified that we have ever heard of Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate…. they are known solely because of the power of their victim. The Roman Empire is long dead; Jesus and his message lives.

They failed to understand that true power cannot die; bury it all you like – the grave can’t hold it. There is an Easter Sunday. It will be resurrected. The counterfeit cannot destroy the true.

And it’s obvious that this principle is replicated in so many who’ve been assassinated.  Those whom the powerful imagined they could dispose of through torture or murder, whose iconic images and messages have instead grown in influence. Because they are true – and their oppression has only served as increased validation of their message.

Public execution is clearly intended as an altogether different message, a warning from the state; this is what we can and will do to you if you are not compliant. But, for us, the very public and prolonged nature of it – which they used as a form of their power – becomes an agent of the true power, the real authority, by making it echo so visibly and iconically down the ages as an intensely powerful and undying message of resistance.

First there is Judgment

There must be accountability. Life is meaningless without it. In respect of the horrors we are witnessing in Palestine, International Law is clear. But the trampling of all its boundaries by those meant to enact it demonstrates the hegemonic reign of an amoral elite who have discarded any attempt at righteous governance. ‘What is truth?’ asks Pontius Pilate. The Cross answers: ‘This is truth and it matters’.

And yet the Christian establishment as a corporate body; cautious, compliant, bought-in and self-protective, is, by and large (with some exceptions on some occasions), in dereliction of its mission, even as it was in Nazi Germany. By failing to take a clear stand in opposition to genocide, they show that the message of the Cross escapes them. Neutrality is not an option. Christians who engage in the struggle know this. These two were executed by the Nazis – aged 39 and 21 respectively – and their witness lives on:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 39 years old. Hanged).

The real damage is done by…those with no sides and no causes.. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. – Sophie Scholl, 21 years old. Beheaded).

And this is Palestinian Rev Munther Isaac now:

Neutrality on Gaza is not an option –  We either side with the logic of power and ruthlessness, with the lords of war and with those who justify and rationalise the killing of children, or side with the victims of oppression and injustice and those who are besieged and dehumanised by the forces of empire and colonisation.

There is a fundamental failure to position the message of reconciliation. Because first there is judgment. Judgment is the defence of the innocent and the upholding of that which there is no future without – truth.

Good News (not just on Easter Sunday)

And even if I didn’t believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead, this is good news. The Word for the oppressed is that they will be vindicated; the crimes against them will be judged, have been judged.

This is Good Friday’s Hallelujah and Immanuel. God with us in solidarity, upholding the inviolability of truth, in the everlasting power in which all who are willing may share, meeting our reality and entering it, gifting us the courage and inspiration to go on working for the promise of a redemption beyond our imagining – a world where Love reigns unchallenged.

‘Alive’ by Anne H. Berry, 2018, commons image