Easter Musings

So I’m perusing the net and find this article: Rejecting Blood Sacrifice Theology, Again and begin, again, to think and feel deeply ill-at-ease about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  So much of evangelical fundamentalist penal substitutionary theology seems so very tribal and primal.  If you really take a hard and honest look at early Judaism it seems to be no different than many of the other tribal fertility cults that existed in the same area at that time in history.  Blood had to be spilled in order for the crops to grow and/or to dispel evil, etc.  Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker in their books Saving Paradise and Proverbs of Ashes question the common understanding that Jesus merely “suffered” on the cross rather than his being a “victim” of very horrific “institutional violence.”  I grapple with how a God who is supposedly “all loving,” “all knowing,” and “all powerful” could take part in such base relations and primal justice?

This kind of pervasive violence seems to be prevalent even in today’s postmodern democratically just society.  In North Tulsa and the Turley area where my church just arrived home from service work two men went on a shooting spree over the weekend and killed and/or hospitalized several people: 2 Suspects Confessed In Tulsa Shootings.  A policeman here in Austin was shot in the line of duty: Officer in Austin fatally shot inside Walmart.  Then there’s this in today’s paper:  Trial of woman accused in child's 2010 death opens with tearful testimony. Then there’s: Trayvon Redux: Austin Cop Shoots and Kills Negro Male Who was Trying to Kill Him; Community Outraged at Cop.  And, we all know of the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman case.

My brother took his life a week after Easter nearly twenty years ago, and my mother just reported that the son of an old friend just took his life.  He was nineteen and planned on going to A&M next year.  He wrote music and played guitar.  I read somewhere that more people kill themselves in the spring more than any other time of the year.  Why is that?  You would think it would be just the opposite.  It’s weird and ironic that in the spring when so much new life is budding and bubbling forth, when we celebrate resurrection, bunnies, eggs, etc that people choose this time to take their own or others lives in such horrific and violent ways.

DEATH, PLEASE, BE NOT PROUD...