Good Friday in the age of George Floyd

 He was a man who had done nothing to deserve death, yet here he was: dying in front of a crowd, another in a constant stream of victims of state violence, his death justified by the danger his executioners believed he posed.

I am, of course, talking about Jesus Christ, whose death some two billion Christians remember today with solemn Good Friday observances. But I could just as easily be talking about George Floyd, a black man whose life was slowly crushed from him by the weight of a police officer's knee on his neck. Floyd allegedly had passed a counterfeit $20 bill in a store minutes earlier. And for that he died. 

Pilate would have been proud of Derek Chauvin, the officer who found it necessary to kneel on Floyd's neck while Floyd grew still and the crowd begged for mercy. Like Chauvin, Pilate knew the value that a show of force had in maintaining control. 

It doesn't even matter if the accused has done anything wrong. Just make an example of him, and the people will stay in line. 

Black deaths at the hands of police have been a matter of routine horror for years, compounded by our rush to assure ourselves that, while unfortunate, there's really nothing we can do about it. It's just part of the cost of having a safe society.  Sometimes people get killed, but it's their fault anyway, because they didn't follow orders, because they acted aggressively, or because police felt threatened. 

And besides he had a rap sheet.

That reaction should chill the very marrow in our bones. There is no reaction further from the heart of Christ and the heart of the Good Friday story that we celebrated in our churches today.

Even those outside the Christian faith know the Good Friday story. Jesus Christ, an innocent man, was arrested under cover of night. Denied the due process of law, he was deprived of his basic human rights, brutally tortured and finally executed.

Preachers often play up the story of Jesus' trials and execution for the moral affront that they were. To convict, all the priests needed was for two witnesses to agree on a charge. The gospels note that they couldn't even manage that. For his part, Pilate, the Roman governor, couldn't find any basis for a charge at all. Neither could Herod.

So why was he executed? The chief priest was afraid that Jesus was disturbing the peace and getting people riled up. Pilate wanted to maintain order. Herod just didn't care.

Christianity used to be a religion of the powerless, but after 1,700 years of holding the reins of imperial power, we've become far too comfortable with the way those reins feel here in the West. We treat the execution of Jesus as though it's an aberration, a once-in-history occasion when the justice system failed in its duty and killed an innocent man. The effect is that we treat the Crucifixion as a one-time failure, an especially heinous act of evil. We always stress the innocence of Jesus to stress how shockingly unjust his death was.

I wonder, if we were to survey his contemporaries, how unusual they found it that Rome would kill an innocent man. I wonder how many peasants, carpenters and bricklayers there were who felt they couldn’t get a fair shake either. I wonder how many people could point to the mountaintop of Jerusalem, to Mount Gerzim in Samaria or to the rolling hills of Galilee and tell the story of family members, neighbors and friends who had been unjustly executed by the state.

I wonder how many people knew what it is like to struggle for breath beneath the crushing weight of a Roman soldier's knee.

They wouldn’t have been hard to find. After the riots that followed the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, when rioters burned the city of Sephoris, the Roman legions restored order through the process of decimation. One man in every 10 was pulled from the crowd, taken outside the city, and crucified as a warning against unrest, without benefit of trial.

The message is the same that police like Chauvin like to send. See our power. Be afraid. Stay in line.

Good Friday wasn't a once-in-history event for the people whom Jesus lived with and walked among. It happened all the time.

It's the same in America now. Remember the names of those who have been denied justice by the authorities and killed without a trial. 

Can you remember them all? Can you remember just all the big names?

Unarmed. Killed by police, their murders justified just as the execution of Christ was. They were disturbing the peace. They were resisting arrest. They were failing to comply. They had a history. There were extenuating circumstances.

We were afraid.

To allow or to approve their deaths is take the reins of Caesar in our hands, give them a familiar grip, and say to ourselves, “This isn't so bad.” When we give approval to their deaths, let us remember the words of Jesus:

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”

Copyright 2021 by David Learn. Used with permission.