Throughout today’s readings we hear of human suffering at the hands of others, and God’s ineffable loving. Growing in the mystery of our faith, we come to understand that God’s abundant love neither prevents nor eliminates our suffering. We also come to know that the first breath of life, our very first inhale, will someday lead to our final exhale being claimed by death.

When that happens those who love us will experience grief. There are times when circumstances produce a grief that takes hold of our bones. It changes who we are. This must have been the lived experience of those who loved Jesus and witnessed his agonizing death.

History teaches that those who speak from the margins are targeted to suffer cruelties, and, quite often, to suffer death. Jesus was a man with a target on his back. He was born and lived on the margins of a powerful and oppressive system that placed no value on his life.  

He resisted the dehumanization of this system by recognizing each person as being made in the image and likeness of his beloved Abba, and he acted accordingly. For him, this was God’s law written on his heart, and his life testified to this truth.

Committed to fulfilling God’s law, Jesus honored the dignity of persons simply because of their God-given dignity. It was not because of their temple sacrifices, faith tradition, privilege, wealth, ethnicity, gender, or what they could do for him. In affirming them worthy of God’s loving, he also inevitably disrupted the systems of power and oppression. He knew it. The disciples knew it. Those who loved him knew it. Those who despised him knew it. Those who had only heard of him knew it.

The song “Were You There?” is one of the most moving hymns performed on this day we identify as Good Friday. On occasion, we may hear a performance so soul stirring that it actually does cause us to tremble. The song was composed by people who had experienced traumatic suffering at the hands of others – enslaved African Americans in the 19^th century. While the questions may appear rhetorical for us, they invite us to consider and even contemplate the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual suffering Jesus endured immediately preceding his death at the hands of others.

On family car rides, my parents would make a common refrain as we drove past a picturesque landscape filled with massive old trees. Their words remain with me. “If these trees could talk.” The car would fall silent as that was the only response to their solemn tone. I have no memory of asking what they meant. The weight of the silence was palpable. To my young mind, the trees must have witnessed the horrific and unimaginable.

In time I would grow in awareness and understanding before beginning to make the same observation myself. Like genuflecting upon entering a sanctuary, the sentiment unfolds. My parents were referencing the thousands of men, women, children and babies, who had been lynched by white supremacists on this land in the not-too-distant past. This was a way of acknowledging the lives lost through the brutality of man’s inhumanity towards others. The trees had been used as facilitating props. Singing of these trees, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit” does cause me to tremble.

I wonder if Jesus had childhood memories of hearing similar comments from Mary and Joseph as they remembered the cruel and agonizing deaths of those who had been crucified or stoned at the hands of others because of untruths or perceived threats to systems of power and oppression. With six degrees of separation, how many families and friends did they know who bore this unbearable grief?

While there are obvious differences between lynching, stoning, and crucifying, there are strong commonalities. Each was used to protect and ensure the continuance of oppressive and powerful systems. Untruths provided participants with delusions of superiority. These public forms of death were also visible threats and shocking reminders for others not to be troublemakers.

Imagine the shame and humiliation of victims - powerless, stripped, and demonized while also being concerned about what would happen to their loved ones. Consider the fear of being surrounded by a mob thirsty for blood – your blood.  

And now, Jesus is in this place as countless others before and after him. His blood mingles with his sweat and tears as it flows over the length of his body before staining the ground. Those near him hear his labored breathing and weakening cries. They smell his blood as they experience the weight of what they see and hear. The target was captured, stripped, flogged, humiliated, crucified, buried for truth.