.jpeg)
As a reminder, you can preview the first two minutes of the film. The Work of the People is supported by a subscription-based model, so if you'd like to access the whole film, along with every other film at the site, it's only $7 a month for a personal subscription, which you can cancel anytime.
Today's film is entitled "Killing Love."
In the preview I share that in the crucifixion of Jesus we find God among the criminals, the condemned and the cursed. Further, I suggest that finding God among the God-cursed--“Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (Gal. 3.13)--is one of the most subversive and "anti-religious" claims in the history of the world.
My point is one made by a variety of theologians, from Moltmann to Girard, concerning how human powers, both political and religious, judge Jesus to be a criminal, an insurrectionist, and a blasphemer. Those religious and political powers kill love. And the gospels expose all this. We hear the verdict at the foot of the cross from the Roman centurion, "Surely, this man was innocent." And yet, the political and religious authorities killed him.
Consequently, how can we ever trust political or religious authorities ever again? If God was once found among the condemned and cursed, how can we be so sure that this isn't happening again right now as we speak? That is what I mean when I say that the cross stands as a "sign of contradiction" in the midst of history against any human presumption to know, with any finality, who is cursed and who is saved. We got it catastrophically wrong at Golgotha, and I don't think anything has changed since.
What are we to do after we killed love? We run toward the victims, toward those hanging on the crosses of the world. That is where God will be found. Not in the corridors of Washington DC or in the pews of churches. Golgotha is God's GPS. God will be found among the lost and outcast. If God stands in divine solidarity with the victims of the world, then that's where the church should be found. As Moltmann writes in The Crucified God:
The crucified Christ became the brother of the despised, abandoned and oppressed. And this is why brotherhood with the 'least of his brethren' is a necessary part of brotherhood with Christ and identification with him. Thus Christian theology must be worked out amongst these people and with them...in concrete terms amongst and with those who suffer in this society...Christian identification with the crucified necessarily brings him into solidarity with the alienated of this world, with the dehumanized and the inhuman...The church of the crucified was at first, and basically remains, the church of the oppressed and insulted, the poor and wretched, the church of the people.
