Seeing the Crucified in the Real World (Witness / 2005)

[struggle4progress]

Seeing the Crucified in the Real World
By Neil Elliott
Wednesday, March 2, 2005

... Shortly before an "elite" unit of the Salvadoran National Guard, wielding U.S.-supplied weapons, murdered him and his companions, Jesuit theologian Ignacio Ellacuría wrote that we truly understand the significance of the crucified Jesus only in light of "the existence of a vast portion of humankind, which is literally and actually crucified" in the world around us. When that reality has been "scandalously ignored" by those of us who practice our religion from a position of tremendous comfort, living in "the geographical world of the oppressors," we remove the death and resurrection of Jesus from the history in which alone they have meaning, the history whose horizon is the reign of God. The result is a naive and self-indulgent piety of the cross ("The Crucified People," in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., and Jon Sobrino, S.J. , pp. 580-604) ...

.... Moving historically from one Gospel account to the next, we find that "as the Jews are inculpated, Pilate is progressively exculpated, emerging finally as a considerate and sympathetic figure." .... The Gospels appear, then, as the headwaters for what became the torrent of anti-Judaism flowing into the twentieth century (see also John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Antisemitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus ). They also obscured the actual political circumstances that rendered Jesus' death a historical necessity: Jesus' "resistance and struggle" against oppression "were simply the consequence in history of a life in response to God's word" (Ellacuría, p. 586) ....

In his superb work Torture and Eucharist in Pinochet's Chile (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), William Cavanaugh describes the effect of Chilean protesters gathering in the streets outside houses in which the Pinochet regime tortured its victims, and making Eucharist. In such actions, the state's "repressive apparatus is made visible on the very bodies of the protesters as they are beaten, tear gassed, hosed down, and dragged away to prison." The protesters "use their bodies as ritual instruments" in a ritual "designed to make the tortured body, which has been disappeared by the state, miraculously appear in the bodies of the protesters." In this way, "Christ's body reappears precisely as a suffering body offered in sacrifice: Christ's body is made visible in its wounds" (pp. 276-7) ...

"The oppression of the crucified people derives from a necessity in history," Ellacuría wrote ironically: "the necessity that many suffer so a few may enjoy, that many be dispossessed so that a few may possess" (p. 591). We are asked daily to accept a "master narrative" in which the deaths of the crucified are inadvertent, accidental, and ultimately irrelevant when measured against the triumphant (and only coincidentally destructive) march of "freedom" around the world. We are asked to suspend our Christian way of knowing in favor of the lie that "everything changed" on September 11th -- and expected to recognize that the intended date is not September 11, 1973, when a CIA-sponsored coup ushered in the torture state in Chile, nor September 11, 1993, when Haitian democratic activist Antoine Izmery was pulled from a church service and murdered by gunmen who now are celebrated as "freedom fighters" by the current administration ...

http://www.thewitness.org/article.php?id=734

[rasputin1952]

1. Looks to me that his whole thought can be boiled down to...

"Sometimes, you must be prepared to make a sacrifice to move all of humankind forward."

Which is what all spiritual aspects of religions speak of to some extent.

[struggle4progress]

2. I find your proposed formulation unsatisfactory, if only because, ...

... by being so abstract, it might serve too many different ends.

The author, of the article posted, reads the crucifixion as a story about a Roman form of execution, practiced in the context of empire: crucifixion was a form of state-sponsored terrorism designed to maintain control.

Like all empires, that one extracted economic production from subjugated peoples to benefit the country that owned the conquering army: many be dispossessed so that a few may possess. Such exploitation typically involves a mystifying and self-justifying ideology that might be described in nearly the words you employ: be prepared to make a sacrifice to move .. humankind forward.

Although the forms of state-sponsored terrorism change with history, the overall dynamics might not: if we open our eyes, we still see humankind .. literally and actually crucified to maintain benefits for a select few at the expense of many. This is not an abstract or philosophical statement but something we can witness immediately and materially, and conscience indicates we must take sides, not only by standing in solidarity with those crucified by the conquering army but by exposing the imperial techniques and even by appealing to the moral sensibilities of the soldiers themselves. It is doubly difficult, if one is a citizen of the empire, subjected daily to the self-justifying propaganda.

<edit: sloppy phrasing>

[rasputin1952]

3. There are times when I feel that we make what is really a relatively

simple message and complicate it to the point where semantics are deft but not definitive.

I think that one of the reasons that most of the messages found in the teachings of Jesus are purposefully simple, and would have been understood by those at the time w/great ease. There are a lot of changes made in translations, in time referenced materials as well as errors made by scribes and monks, both deliberate and by less sinister means.

What I was thinking of was that there "could" be a time in someone's life when they must make a choice for their ideology or their submission to authority that goes directly against said ideology. This can happen to anyone, of any religion (or lack thereof), of any ideology at any time. It is a call of being willing to actually make a sacrifice for what you believe in. That sacrifice need not be physical, but could be psychological as well, such as having to live with the reality that you ran from what you were proselytizing for a long period of time, you did not have what you were requiring others to follow.

In the short form, hypocrisy is the key element...does one have the fortitude to stand up for what they say they believe, put it on the line so to speak.

While what you have posted reveals a great deal about the devotion of the writer, and speaks volumes of truth about how those that "have" are very willing to oppress others and exact from them a high toll. I also see where the principle is to be willing to stand up to authority in the hope that things can change, to inspire others to do so, and to realize that one is accountable for what the teach.

[struggle4progress]

4. I agree with much of what you say. But ideology is abstract and ...

... impersonal: however useful and important an abstract analysis may be, one ultimately must set it aside in order to see concrete humans in their specific particularity.

A typical use of ideology is to blind us to the fact that oppression involves concrete acts of one concrete person against another: the oppression has an interpersonal aspect, the suffering is always personal, and solidarity-as-ideology is not the same thing as solidarity-as-personal-relationship.

[rasputin1952]

5. Yes, you have an excellent point as the point where...

"oppression involves concrete acts of one concrete person against another", but this is where ideology comes into focus. Idealists see that such oppression should not exist, therefore, on often nothing more than faith alone that their ideology is the "correct" ideology, they stand up against oppression.

Generally, the oppression becomes more intolerable when this happens, and as history has shown us, eventually that oppression is relieved by some form of revolution within the system.

Suffering is always personal, but on many levels; the individual being oppressed directly, their families, their friends, and upon occasion even their enemies suffer to an extent. By leaning back on ideological roots, one can feel empathy, and this empathy can grow, this is where the revolutionary comes from. Of course, it does not always work out like this, but in many major changes in world history, it has. At other times, societies have been driven into near extinction because they drove themselves to the limit, and could no longer afford to keep the oppression up. In cases like that, they became easy targets for marauders and social changes.

The physical and ideological/spiritual intertwine and are in constant motion, changing as a person or group changes in both physical and spiritual ways. With each step forward, (or backward), in knowledge, the physical and ideological/spiritual aspects expand or contract, depending on what is learned.

It is a dance between both realms, each step bringing new, and hopefully brighter, aspects into the life experience.