I still drive by my old church. The building looks the same as when I was in high school. The cross still feels large, it is still painted white, and still noticeable from the road. But it has taken on new meaning, and that is because Christianity is a religion of liberation tainted by a legacy of oppression. When Columbus and other explorers sailed to the New World, they settled it under the symbol of the cross, proclaiming a God whose providence had handed them the lands and peoples they found. The white cross exposes and embodies this contradiction.

For this reason, Christian symbols risk devastation. As we grow conscious of Christianity’s complicity and participation in oppression, we can lose their liberating meaning. Colonial conquest, white-supremacy, and racism, class-based indifference to the suffering and precarity of the poor — these histories can obscure the liberating meaning of these symbols entirely. This is how Christian symbols became devastated to me.

Symbolic devastation is not about an outright rejection of Christian symbols. I didn’t want to make myself an enemy of faith; quite the contrary, I held the conviction that in Jesus there was something of liberation and yet felt as though the dominant Christianity had nothing to offer. I wanted to hang onto faith yet couldn’t find a way out of the lapsed theology. So, I wrestled.

Can the cross signify anything other than colonial violence and its continued legacy? Can the cross be a liberating symbol? What does it look like it to interpret the cross after symbolic devastation? My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. In this final episode for this series on symbolic devastation, it is these question that we explore.

In communities devastated by the violence of colonialism and racism, there arose a different way of viewing that symbol. As Jon Sobrino says, God reveals Godself not only for the suffering world, but in it. If we are to locate the liberating meaning of the Gospel, we must turn to the contexts of the suffering world, for it is there that we find the symbol of the cross being drawn upon to bear witness against injustice, and whether implicitly or explicitly, it is in this witness that we find the very presence and power of God at work. In the cross, these communities discovered a God who affirms their struggle for genuine liberation. One example of this tradition can be found in Cuidad Juárez, a city on the border of Mexico and Texas.[1]

The past twenty-nine years, Cuidad Juárez has been the site of a series of rapes and murders of women. The theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid describes this violent phenomenon as feminicide, to emphasize the fact that it is women who are the targets of this “ritualized violence.”[2] Between 1993 and 2009, officials have confirmed upwards of 600 women victim to feminicide.[3] There are multiple reasons why Cuidad Juárez is a site of this domination. Pineda-Madrid blames it first on the vulnerability created by economic exploitation. Following the North American Free-Trade Agreement, US company-owned factories moved to the border for cheap labor and were willing to exploit women for it.[4] When women began to disappear, many police, religious, and government officials remained indifferent, refusing to investigate larger social and systemic causes. Paired to cultural expectations that women are supposed to be silent about their suffering, this has created a culture ripe with exploitation.[5]

But not everyone in the city has been indifferent to this violence. In response to feminicide, protestors marched into downtown Juárez and placed a cross at the Paso de Norte bridge.[6] Pineda-Madrid describes this cross as a “shrine for grieving families, friends, and others who demand that the violence end.”[7] It represent the deaths of women whose bodies are tortured and mutilated by a culture of exploitation and violence. And in remembering these deaths, the protestors have called for accountability.

But the cross also suggests more than that. Pineda-Madrid sees in the cross a theology of divine solidarity with these women. This is a theology of the cross from the other side of domination. Here, the cross has been reappropriated and integrated into calls against injustice. Here is Pineda-Madrid’s whole quote:

The use of the crosses in these practices suggests parallels between the murder of these girls and women and the murder of Jesus. Both were victims of the unjust practices of the state and of the reputedly compromised complicity of their local religious leaders. Both knew the horrific angst of feeling abandoned by God and allowed to persist. The horrific execution of both were intended as public billboards. Jesus’s crucifixion served as a warning and threat to anyone who would dare challenge the Roman Empire’s authority. The dead bodies of these girls and women were often left in public places, flaunting the fact that poor females could be brutally killed with impunity, ultimately as a warning to any woman of modest resources who sought to stand up for herself. She could be killed and no one would be held accountable. Implicit here is the message that, like Jesus, poor girls’ and women’s bodies are disposable and have no standing before the state or, apparently in the eyes of church authorities.[8]

Pineda-Madrid’s insights here tell us much about the protestors and the implicit theology of the cross. For them, the cross is not a dead symbol. Rather, it is an icon into the paradox of God’s presence with and in a feminicidal world. If God is God of the cross, the one revealed in a Jewish man whose body hung in vulnerability on an imperial torture device unto death, then the Good News is about and for people suffering at the hands of injustice.

More recently, a memorial of pink crosses was built to remember the murders of twenty-five women. Their bodies were found just outside of the city during 2013 and 2014.[9] They too are victim to the violence of feminicide. And yet, like the protestors who installed the cross at Paso de Norte, this memorial invokes a theology of the cross at odds with domination and oppression. It recalls to mind the liberating potential of Christian symbols.

These protestors who struggle against feminicide invoke the cross and in so doing announce a God who abides in the struggle for liberation. That the victims were identified in the cross and that Jesus was identified in them does not justify their suffering. Rather, it exposes the evil we commit against women is an evil that strikes at the heart of God. The pink crosses bear witness to the God enfleshed in the victims of feminicide. This is radical divine solidarity.

But they are not the only ones who have found in the cross a radical theology of God. Such a theology was also elaborated among enslaved African Americans in the early American era. The Catholic womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland has pointed out that rather than rejecting the cross completely, enslaved African Americans interpreted the cross through their own experience of the violence of slavery. As Copeland writes: “caught in the labyrinth of the social oppression of slavery, black people fixed their eyes on Jesus and his cross as they grappled with the absurdity of” it.[10] She adds: “We should not be surprised that many spirituals focus on the suffering, the crucifixion, and the death of Jesus. The enslaved folk knew in their bodies and minds, hearts and souls what it meant to endure suffering and abuse, and in Jesus’s suffering and death they recognized their own.”[11]

For Copeland, the cross was not abandoned. Rather, it gave theological meaning to the dehumanizing conditions of Black life within the plantation system. Their suffering was crucifixion-like violence. Take, for example, these lyrics which Copeland records: “They nail my Jesus down / They put him on the crown of thorns / O’ see my Jesus hangin’ high! / He look so pale an’ bleed / so free: / O’ don’t you think it was a shame / He hung three hours in dreadful pain?”[12] Copeland sees in a theology of the cross the unity of the enslaved and Jesus. The crucified God of Jesus of Nazareth is the God who is companion to those who struggle against and are victim to the chattel slavery system.

The white cross of the megachurch I attended represents a Christianity bent on domination, a Christianity that helped generate the violence that still haunts our world - European conquest, indigenous genocide, Black enslavement, and white supremacy. But the protestors against feminicide and the enslaved African Americans who conjured up the lyrical theology of the spirituals have found another interpretation of the cross. Here the cross stands for God’s presence with the least of these; a God who sides with the poor; a God who journeys with them unto the very end, into death and out of it; a God who works for liberation here. This is the God who, I believe, is revealed in the life of Jesus.

Born to Mary, a young woman outside of Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, an insignificant town to a family of insignificant standing, God descended into and entered a human world burdened by oppression. Jesus was the child of this descent.

One can see the influence of his mother in Jesus’s teachings. Mary, was a student of the prophets and somebody who maintained the most radical elements of the traditions of Judaism. When God promises that she will conceive of a son, she shouts out and praises the God who looks after the lowly. For her God was God of the least of these, the one who raged at the violence brought by the powerful and whose glory was found in God’s commitment to this world, not merely the next.

As a child, Jesus must flee from Herod who, threatened by the boy-messiah, executes children under the age of two hoping to slay the right one. This makes Jesus and his family refugees in Egypt until Herod’s violence had ended. It is a breathtaking and astounding narration of Divine activity: God on the run as a child escaping the violent will of Herod.[13] For the New Testament writers, God is a fugitive.

When Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee, he calls the people to repentance, to turn away from their sin, and to embrace God’s coming kingdom. In his three-year ministry, Jesus’s vision of freedom from sin and freedom for life with God and others contains this-worldly implications, no doubt shaped by his childhood.

His first students were fishermen, people who work near the sea, which in the Jewish traditions was a symbol of chaos. The sea represented the fragility of creation, its ever-present possible destruction, its utter contingency. The fishermen beheld this reality daily, for the sea was source of their wellbeing. When Jesus comes to them, their tools are broken, they have been maimed by this vulnerability. Here the precarity of the sea is met by Jesus and his invitation for these workers to follow him and find God. And there he was: the God who tamed the chaos of the seas at the beginning of creation was now dwelling among them.

Where he went, Jesus challenged those forces that oppressed human persons. Jesus healed the sick; he proclaimed a divine love for the poor; he exorcised demons who truncated the people they possessed; he condemned Israel’s religious elite for their exploitative use of Torah; he called out temple corruption and greed; and he heightened the affirmation that love of God requires a love for one’s neighbor. If you want to know God, he tells them, act like the Samaritan who helped the man stranded and left for dead in the ditch. This love and care for persons and bodies was a sure sign of the presence of God.

And in this sense, Jesus’s very being pointed to a liberation utterly concerned with this life. In the life of Jesus God’s kingdom arrived in history. And as biblical scholar Morna Hooker writes, Jesus was “the embodiment of God’s kingdom,” his practice of taking care of persons making visible God’s will to face and overcome that which oppresses creation.[14]

It is this message that threatened the powerful of Jesus’s own context.[15] When Jesus preached the kingdom of God, he envisioned God’s identity being revealed precisely in those who were traditionally considered outside of Divine communion. For Israel’s leaders, this meant a God not bound by the temple, a God who was flexible in the expectations of following Torah, a God found among the sick, outcasts, and gentiles. Paradoxically, this was a God faithful to the Old Testament’s own traditions which speak of a God who hears the suffering cries of the poor, who attends to the abandoned, and who will not be bound by human custom. For the Roman magistrate, this meant a God who wasn’t identified with Caesar; a God who stands with the very people Rome colonized and conquered. God, Jesus seemed to think, dwelled in the backcountry of the empire.

Still, many of Israel’s religious elite colluded with Rome to help murder Jesus (Mark 11: 18), an intent that formed when he healed on the Sabbath and when he called out temple corruption. When Jesus was in Rome’s hand, some of the leaders instigated the crowd to support Jesus’s crucifixion. It was a violent spectacle. The soldiers tore away Jesus’s clothes while they mocked and beat him, they then hung him upon a cross, his body mangled unto death (Mark 15:15). We are told that Jesus cries out in agony: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” “My God my God why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15: 24). In Jesus on the cross, God drew near to absolute injustice. To use the language of Vincent Lloyd, God drew near to a “primal scene of domination,” not as a divine justification but as divine solidarity, as Divine Life encountering, condemning, and overcoming Oppression and Death.[16]

Situated within the context of Jesus’s own ministry and teachings of the kingdom of God, the cross represents the radicality of the New Testament’s confession of God’s nearness in the face of injustice. Far from being a symbol of domination, the cross stands in as a symbolic reference point for the whole of Jesus’s life in relationship to the kingdom of God and the consequences this embodied proclamation carries. This is the subversive power of the cross and crucifixion of Jesus. Where Rome intended the cross to signify Jesus’s inferiority and fragility before the empire’s totalizing power, the cross — integrated into Jesus’s life — points to God overcoming domination. Rome lost their possession of the cross as God brought it within the Divine Life. In the cross God reveals the ultimate value of creation, so potent of a value that God would take up creaturely life even if it meant confronting a power that was content to torture and murder God’s own self.

The cross is a symbolic witness to Jesus’s teachings and life: his radicalizing of Torah’s command to love God and neighbor by focusing on loving the poor; his ministry of healing and exorcism; his condemnation of religious and political abuse; and his solidarity with human beings through excruciating and catastrophic death and into revolutionary new life.

What does this suggest about symbolic devastation?

In these four episodes I have wrestled with the potential loss of meaning of Christian symbols in the face of their corruption and abuse. This abuse is sewn deep into history with each cross planted in the name of conquest, domination, and indifference. And yet, if we follow the invitation of liberation theologians like Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino who encourage us to search the suffering world for a different theology of the cross, one comes up deeply surprised.

Many harmed by the cross did not abandon Christianity and its religious symbols totally. Rather they reworked the symbols according to their own context. In the context of feminicide, protestors invoked the cross as a matter of calling for accountability and in so doing bore witness to the nature of divine presence: God with, in, and revealed as these suffering victimized women. Divine revelation through solidarity today. The same is true for the Spirituals, for in them we encounter what Copeland calls the “dark wisdom” discovered by the enslaved - that Jesus was not the slave master, nor that Jesus was indifferent to slavery - but rather that Jesus was “one of them.” The cross symbolized and gave witness to an abolitionist vision of union with God. Their yearning for freedom was God’s yearning for freedom.

What I’m trying to suggest is a crack in the violent history of the cross. There exists a multiplicity of traditions from the margins of the suffering world that bear witness to a God working for freedom. And for many who live and move within those contexts the cross has been a symbol for giving theological meaning to their experience. This was not meaning that condoned nor justified the violence they experienced; rather, it was meaning that energized resistance and filled them with life and hope in the face of near inevitable death. They did not suffer alone; the victimized did not die absent of God by themselves; those suffering at the hands of colonization were not left to squalor but were, like Hagar’s son, held by God even in death, and in that there is the alluring call of freedom and liberation, the discovery of God’s desire for a freedom that is not other-worldly but this-worldly, a freedom here now.

Symbolic devastation is about coming to terms with the legacy of the tainted nature of Christian symbols. But it is also about entering eyes wide-opened into that legacy with the anticipation that God can be present in absence, alive and energizing movements toward liberation in a world built around domination. This is, after all, the ultimate confession of Christian proclamation: in death, life. Jesus crucified, yes, but also risen, wounded yet somehow more fully alive then before. Because, in the end, God is the God of life. And if one can acknowledge and confess the silence caused by symbolic devastation, they can perhaps discover the voice of God.

Jesus’s death was the ultimate form of symbolic devastation. The embodiment of God’s kingdom entering history, he was grossly silenced by Rome. After his crucifixion, Jesus’s silent corpse laid in a tomb still and gone. His disciples were defeated. One of his most devoted disciples, Peter, was so devastated that he denied knowing Jesus altogether, weeping to himself because of the failure of God and the death of his teacher (Luke 22:54). Peter represented what they all felt: emptiness after the messiah they felt and touched became a corpse. They too experienced the trauma and loss of meaning as they watched their friend and teacher hang dead.

Mary was one of those devastated disciples. The third day after his death, she visited Jesus’s tomb at dawn. Seeing the tomb stone had been rolled away, she was dispirited and distraught. While the other disciples searched the tomb for the body, scripture tells us she wept (John 20:11).

But then she heard the voice: “Mary!” Amid the silence, deep in the graveyard, itself a symbol of death, she heard and felt Jesus’s presence. His voice dawned after silence. Like Mary, I believe that Jesus still speaks, and that Christian symbols can facilitate an encounter with Jesus’s liberating presence and voice. But as our conversation with Segundo and Sobrino, the protestors of feminicide and the enslaved who sang spirituals reveal, hearing this voice requires we remember the Christian traditions at the margins of the suffering world. Perhaps then we shall discover that God has not been taken away, that instead God’s voice resounds – however quietly – in our world today.

Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

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About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.

Footnotes

[1] Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. These podcast episodes draw on research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis.

[2] Pineda-Madrid, 12.

[3] Ibid., 13.

[4] Ibid., 29.

[5] Ibid., 58.

[6] Ibid., 102.

[7] Ibid., 101.

[8] Ibid., 146.

[9] https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/world/juarez/2022/09/03/memorial-honors-victims-of-femicide-in-jurez/65470252007/

[10] Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, 26.

[11] Ibid., 28.

[12] Ibid., 29.

[13] A correction: in the podcast I said God on the run as a child escaping “Pharoah.” I meant to say Herod, though the New Testament writers do suggest parallels between Jesus and Moses, Herod and Pharoah.

[14] Morna Hooker, “’Who Can this Be?’ The Christology of Mark’s Gospel,” in: Contours of Christology in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 79-99, 85.

[15] Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, 208.

[16] Vincent Lloyd, Black Dignity, 13. Vincent Lloyd draws on the language of “primal scene” from Saidiya Hartman. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 1.