The Tortured Christ and the Tortured

It is not yet Good Friday, a day when we will stop to consider the one who died on an imperial Roman cross. Jurgen Moltmann has reflected on the relationship of Jesus' experience and that of others who are tortured. I shall post this paragraph or two and maybe others later. This Comes from Jesus Christ for Today's World

At the centre of the Christian faith is the history of the passion: the history of the betrayed, denied, tortured and crucified Christ. No other religion has a martyred figure at its centre. This has evoked revulsion among many aesthetes, from Cicero to Goethe. But among men and women it has evoked sympathy too. The helplessness and forsakenness of Christ awakens our compassion, just like the helpless baby in the manger. What does the torture of Christ have to say about torture in general? Does this torture justify torture by Christians, or the torture of the enemies of Christianity, either here on earth -- even more -- afterwards in hell? Or does the tortured Christ mean the end of torture, because he is the end of every possible justification of torture, whether it be religious or secular?

These important questions must be answered with a resounding no, as Moltmann himself does. The cross is, Moltmann says, a sign of Christ's solidarity with all victims of violence and torture.

Christ's cross stands between the countless crosses set up by the powerful and the violent throughout history, down to the present day. It stood in the concentration camps, and stands today in Latin America and in the Balkans, and among those tortured by hunger in Africa. His suffering doesn't rob the suffering of these others of its dignity. He is among them as their brother, as a sign that God shares in our suffering and takes our pain on himself. Among all the un-numbered and un-named tortured men and women, that "Suffering Servant of God" is always to be found. They are his companions in suffering, because he has become their companion in theirs. The tortured Christ looks at us with the eyes of tortured men and women. (Jurgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today's World, Fortress Press, 1994, pp. 64-65).

If Christ stands with the tortured as their brother, then surely there is no Christian justification of torture. Surely Jesus doesn't give the okay to waterboarding. It really doesn't matter what others will do, if we are Christians then we can't stand back and support it.

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