Christ Destroys His Cross

By David Johns

I went to the Museo de Arte Moderno de Carrillo Gil in January with one goal in mind: to see the painting I had been thinking about for the past two years. Like the song you can’t quite get out of your head, this painting, Cristo destruye su cruz (Christ destroys his cross), has found its way into my conversations and into my classroom. I was in Mexico City again, so I took the Metrobús south along Insurgentes to the Altavista platform and walked about six blocks to the museum on Avenida Revolución.

It wasn’t there.

“It’s in the archives,” one of the staffers told me, and it wouldn’t be exhibited any time soon.

“A private exhibition, maybe?” I asked, thinking it couldn’t hurt.

Not likely; but she said I should send a letter stating why I needed to see the painting. So, I sent the letter. Then I sent another. After a few weeks they sent one to me.

José Clemente Orozco was a contemporary of Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, the paint-splattered trio of muralists who gave visual expression to a new vision of Mexico emerging from the Revolution. Orozco blew off his left hand as a child while playing with fireworks so he never had to “let his right hand know what his left was doing,” he could simply be free; and that’s what he was as an artist.

He painted the theme, Cristo destruye su cruz, three times in his life, twice as murals—one of which still survives at Darmouth College—and once on a 4’ x 3’ canvas. The third he painted in 1943 in a studio at 132 Ignacio Mariscal in Mexico City, where today a Friends meeting gathers each Sunday.

“Parece como si fuera un leñador,” I told someone who asked how Jesus was portrayed in the painting; he looks like a lumberjack. After being crucified—that is obvious from his disfigured foot—Jesus swings a wooden handled ax and chops down the cross.

I can imagine him shouting with each impact of the blade: “Ya basta! Enough!” Or, as the biblical writers captured it: “It is finished!” To the violence that destroys and oppresses, to all the laws and institutions that diminish humanity under their power—enough. Orozco paints the cross not as wood, except for one small section that looks like a wooden stake, but as marble stone, the same material forming the crumbled ruins (a temple? a government palace?) behind the Jesus figure.

Taking down the cross is not enough. If one lives in the life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars, as Fox declared, more than war needs to go. Orozco’s Jesus is surrounded by symbols of those things that lead to crucifixions, Jesus’ as well as the crucifixion of countless, faceless others who are sacrificed in world where power crushes the vulnerable.

I returned to the museum and sat in the chief curator’s office for an hour talking about Mexican art, Orozco’s politics, creativity, and liberation theology. She was curious what a theologian from Indiana saw in this work. Then she led me into the archives, a small warehouse-like area where the work of masters was tucked away waiting their turn to breathe again in the galleries.

Cristo destruye su cruz was propped up against some shelving. I spent an hour with Orozco’s ax-swinging Jesus, on my hands and knees, examining color, lines, images, and the little things that aren’t so little when in the hands of a great artist.

For three hours in the museum’s research library I read everything the director placed in front of me—exhibition catalogues, biographies, reviews.

I was invited one last time to sit with Orozco’s canvas. Deeply grateful, I offered the curator a gift. She declined.

“I see something new in this work,” she said. “When Christ destroys his cross it’s not an act of revenge.”

It’s an act of hope for all creation.

David Johns is Associate Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. He is an Associate Editor of Quaker Religious Thought, a member of First Friends Meeting, Richmond, and a proud member of the Associación Teológica Ecuménica Mexicana.

Working with Mexican Theologians

I recently participated in an ecumenical conference in Mexico City at the invitation of the Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos (CEE). It was inspiring to work with so many thoughtful people who are deeply involved in social justice and its integration with theological reflection. Of course, connecting reflection to responsible engagement has been important to me for a long time and it is always good to connect with others who share similar commitments. However, the conference was as challenging as it was inspiring because, almost to a person, the participants’ theological reflection was born out of direct and first-hand experience of walking side by side with the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized. This is good…excellent, even. However, it was a departure from many of the conferences I frequent where folks are either thinking but rarely act or where they act but rarely think.

The conference, Esperanza de Liberación y Teología (the hope of liberation and theology), was attended by about three hundred Mexican theologians, philosophers, and activists from across the country, from those teaching in one of Mexico’s many theological institutes, to those working with indigenous populations in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to those working for peace in Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of the narco wars where over one thousand people have been killed this year alone.

Over the past three years I have visited the CEE in Mexico City a number of times and have twice taken ESR students with me as part of the Theology in Context course. Thus, when I received the director’s invitation not only to attend, but to participate as well and to present some of my own work on the conference’s theme, I was honored and accepted immediately. I was one of a handful of non-Mexicans who gathered at the Comunidad Teológica Mexicana to work on topics at the intersection of theology and social engagement. We were assigned specific groups where we focused most of our energy: human rights, economics, environment, Church practice, and citizen participation. Based upon some of my recent work, I was assigned to a mesa de diálogo focused on theology and/of migration.

Working in this group make me aware of how different the US experience is from the Mexican. This was evident simply in the language we used. If we had been meeting in the United States we probably would have used “immigration” rather than “migration.” It’s another angle on the same phenomenon and a reminder why neither the US nor Mexico can address the issue satisfactorily without substantial cooperation from the other.
The reality in Mexico is of citizen movement to the US or to one of the country’s major urban centers, particularly Mexico City. Additionally, Mexico sees the movement of persons across its southern border as they make their way north. However, before reaching the boarder many are subjected to rape, robbery, human trafficking, hunger, or death. As one participant explained: many escape violence in their own country only to encounter it in the US and in the journey through Mexico. She recounted a saying: antes de llegar a sueño americano tienes que pasar por la pesadilla mexicana (before you arrive at the American dream you have to go through the Mexican nightmare).

In July 2008 I spent time with a couple from Honduras who were traveling to the United States without documents. They were spending a few days in Mexico City where she was waiting to have an abortion. She had been raped by a coyote who had beaten her husband into unconsciousness and stole the money and belongings they carried with them.

Difficult social realities such as these were front and center at the conference. One participant described our work with the Spanish verb aterrizar (to land) which we generally use when speaking about airplanes and runways. Tenemos que aterrizar nuestra teología—we have to land our theology, she said, bring it out of the clouds. We tried to do teología contextualizada. To this end, our work was divided between first seeing the issue (descriptive), and then thinking about the issue (analytical), and finally, formulating proposals for acting (application).  

In addition to the working groups, we began each day with worship and had plenty of time for fellowship. I stayed on campus with the Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos staff and roomed with a priest from Oaxaca. We cooked together and had enough late-night conversations to keep me thinking for quite a while. Several plenary sessions helped direct our attention as well. We heard from Doris Garcia Mayor, Padre Alejandro Solalinde, Maria Pilar Aquino, and also from Enrique Dussel, who in the last year and a half has become an intellectual hero of mine.

Dussel’s critique of post-modernity and neoliberalism was pointed. He drew upon Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Puebla Conference of 1979 where theologians began articulating justice in terms of “God’s preferential option for the poor” (which Paul Farmer has more recently modified: “disease makes a preferential option for the poor”). Dussel noted that neoliberalism exploits time and the earth as much as it exploits people. There is no rest in globalization and its march toward totalization; there is no sabbath—not for humans, not for the earth. Yet, salvation is not for humans alone; it is for the entire cosmos. El reino de Dios no cede la tierra (the kingdom of God does not give up the earth). A sufficient economy needs to take into account local communities as well as broader publics—el consenso del pueblo (consensus of the people), and families, and the health of human beings and the entire planet. This is the cost of a well-ordered life—economy (a concept that has been hijacked by those incapable of thinking beyond money and “free” markets).

Without a doubt there was tremendous energy among participants at the conference for exploring the social implications of being Church and it seemed no one hesitated to name concretely the challenges we face in our present context. Although we were surrounded constantly by an awareness of the crushing poverty and suffering of the human family, an underlying hope was present as well and it was repeated by many throughout the week—otro mundo es posible (another world is possible).

As I was saying my goodbyes, both to a city I dearly love and to people who are becoming very good friends, I said to one of the coordinators: “It’s been great to be here with all of you.” She responded: “Here there is no ‘all of you’ (ustedes); there is only ‘us’ (nosotros). This spirit of welcome extended also when I was accepted into the Mexican Ecumenical Theological Association. I’m not sure how many other non-Mexicans are members of this group, but there is no doubt that with these folks I feel right at home.

David Johns is Associate Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. He is an Associate Editor of Quaker Religious Thought, a member of First Friends Meeting, Richmond, and now a proud member of the Associación Teológica Ecuménica Mexicana.

The Silence of Holy Saturday

By David L. Johns

The most penetrating sound of September 2001 came
not on Tuesday the 11th but on Sunday the 16th.

In November of 1963, only two days after Kennedy
was murdered in Dallas, gridiron warriors assembled on one
hundred yard fields and pushed, and tackled, and punted, and
passed. Near capacity crowds were somber, but nevertheless
cheered on seven NFL games; Pittsburgh tied Chicago 17-17,
Cleveland trounced the Cowboys by ten points. On a Sunday
afternoon in late January 1991, while soldiers were engaged in a
Storm in the Desert, the most creative television commercials of
the season were shown during breaks from Super Bowl XXV.
Allied troops fought Saddam; the New York Giants beat the
Buffalo Bills 20-19.

The most penetrating sound of September 2001 came
not on Tuesday the 11th but on Sunday the 16th; in stadiums
across the country there was no football, there was only silence.
The silent stadium was a more truthful witness to the moment
than were the immediate demands for war; the silent stadium
spoke more poignantly than the immediate calls for peace.

It was the simple-minded naiveté of both the hawks and
the doves that first made me uneasy. It was all so simple. Too
simple. “Steer clear, dear Odysseus, steer clear and save your
life!”

On one hand, there was the immediate response to “kill
them,” “retaliate with everything we have,” “unleash the dogs
of war.” We are victims, they are the enemy! On the day
after, Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, “A day cannot

live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have
rage. What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of
purple American fury—a ruthless indignation.”

At the same time, another chorus of voices sang a
dirge of national self-loathing. Here the model of blame is
inverted…they are the victims and we are the enemy. “Our
foreign policy has alienated and disenfranchised and, therefore,
the actions of the terrorists, while horrible, were certainly
understandable.”

It was all so simple.

Then came the statement of Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell—identical in sentiment to the statements made by
some others. “The United States is getting what it deserves,
what it has asked for. The anger of God (or, Disenfranchised
Arab and Muslim peoples) has been simmering for years and
on September 11 it reached the boiling point. We know who
the guilty party is, says Falwell and Robertson: homosexuals,
the ACLU, feminists, and abortion rights activists; we know
who the guilty party is, say the purveyors of national self-abuse:
corporate America, the government, the military establishment.
Therefore, since we are guilty, the attacks of God (or,
Disenfranchised Arab and Muslim peoples) is understandable, if
not actually justified.”

It was all so simple.

But it was precisely the simplicity of the solutions that
convinced me of their impossibility. From the “war on them” to the “war on us” everything had the ring of sanctimoniousness and superficiality. Many organizations hastily generated statements concerning the attacks. These statements appeared so swiftly it was obscene.

It was so with Friends. By Wednesday morning the
Friends Committee for National Legislation and Friends
General Conference had posted statements on the internet.
FCNL even posted photos of its office draped with a banner
sporting a bumper-sticker-esque slogan: “War is not the
answer.” Like many other colleges, even my beloved Earlham
jumped into the real-time statement game. In a statement dated
September 12th and posted on the college’s website: “Yesterday
[the] President, student leaders, and teaching and administrative
faculty leaders drafted this response to the day’s events.” I
was breathless. Memos and family pictures from the World
Trade Center towers were still drifting over Manhattan and we
were announcing to the world what we would and would not
do, what was in principle acceptable and what was not. For a
denomination that speaks much of the value of silence there was
precious little of it in response to September 11.

These statements were formulaic and predictable—
like form letters resting peacefully on a hard drive waiting for
someone to fill in the blanks, verbal ejaculations to protect
against our fear of corporate anger. They included a ceremonial
denunciation of the attacks to quiet the masses, then they
stated prepackaged solution. But how could we know how to
respond? In rushing to make statements we demonstrated just how messianic some of us think we are.

Blaming clogged the internet, but empty football
stadiums spoke more truthfully. The orthodoxy of political
correctness, of course, still grants permission to make
demeaning and smug remarks concerning “brainless
testosterone-driven athletes who sit in the back of the
classroom;” however, it was the chorus of silence sung by
absent line-backers that spoke more wisely than the erudite
prose of any academic.

Our time is distinguished by a certain ambiguity. An
ambiguous time is a time in-between, a place of tension, a time
when simple answers simply do not answer; the foundations
that once supported us have been removed and nothing is
completely settled. Louis-Marie Chauvet has written that even
God does not guarantee our certainties. By scrambling to ease
our dis-ease we ingest a panacea that inoculates us from living
with the pain, the anguish, and the anger of real victims.

Each year in the liturgical rhythm of the Christian
calendar a little noted day is lodged between two more
celebrated days—Holy Saturday. It is often neglected, but
it speaks to this moment in our history. Our time is a Holy
Saturday. The horror of the crucifixion is over; the image of
the embodiment of our hopes broken and bleeding and dead still
lingers fresh and raw. In the liturgy, Holy Saturday reenacts
a waiting for something we know has come. Our waiting is
different. In agony and in fear we want to rush into the tomb
and rescue Jesus, to save him from the chill of the tomb. But when we remove Jesus on Saturday we have nothing but a corpse. Easter has not yet come. And who knows, maybe Easter will never come. But, if it does, who can know what form it will take?

Holy Saturday is a day of wondering, of anguish, of
anger, of gnawing emptiness, of fear, and of the questioning
eyes of children. Holy Saturday is a place in-between, a time of
waiting, a time for tears, a space for grieving. Holy Saturday is
a day to remain silent before the ambiguity of life and death, of
death in life.

In many ways, Holy Saturday is the longest day of the
year. “Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord
one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one
day” (II Peter 3:8). This longest “day” began on September
12th , but it has not been respected nor reverenced by us crafters
of words or by backseat legislators. Yet, silent stadiums …

Plato spoke of metaxy as an in-between place, a place
where humans meet God. We are standing now between
horror and hope in a chasm of betweenness, uncertain, messy,
dangerous, ambiguous. Yet, this metaxy is the place where
God is. On the lengthy Holy Saturday following September
11th I did not stand with chattering academics or with military
advisors or with spin doctors or with resolute pacifists; I chose
to stand in-between, beside the padded shoulders of a silent line
backer.

This essay will be included in an upcoming book, Quakering
Theology, and first appeared in Friends Journal (March 2002).


David Johns is Associate Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. He has traveled extensively among Friends in Mexico and Central America and is a regular contributor to Quaker Religious Thought. He resides in Richmond, Indiana with his family.

What is the Greatest Challenge Facing the Church?

By David Johns

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the church in our own time is the greatest challenge facing the church at any time: understanding the times and discerning the Spirit in how to respond.

This is not easy work. It requires careful observation and critical thinking. It requires the courage to 'desacralize the status quo,' whether that status quo is in society, nation, cherished denomination, place of employment, or our own heart and assumptions. Until this status quo is desacralized it can not be analyzed, and until analyzed it can not be determined to be just or unjust, that is, whether it is in step with the gospel message of life and hope, or whether it is simply another means for exploitation and idolatry.

A seminary education can help us consider differently what is the sacred, how to see clearly and to evaluate faithfully, and how to know more profoundly the gospel of life.

Here is the difference, however. Some programs of study place emphasis either upon the analysis or upon the action. When we are at our best -and we strive often, I think, to evaluate whether we are so doing -  ESR attempts to bring these together, understanding the times, and discerning the Spirit in how to respond. It is easier to give our attention to only one piece of the equation, but that is not in the long run going to form women and men prepared to address creatively the challenge of being the people of God in our time.

David Johns is Associate Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. He has traveled extensively among Friends in Mexico and Central America and is a regular contributor to Quaker Religious Thought. He resides in Richmond, Indiana with his family.