Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit--March 22, 2017

"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us--for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree'--in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith." [Galatians 3:13-14]

Billie Holiday is on my running Lenten playlist.  

Yes, that Billie Holiday--the one you might be able to hear in your mind singing old standards like "Our Love Is Here to Stay" or "You Turned the Tables on Me." Her voice is part of the soundtrack that helps me to understand the gaping mystery at the heart of the Christian faith: the lynched God.

Holiday sings a haunting song--a song whose opening trumpet blare and ominous minor piano chords ring in my ear long after the last note--written by Abel Meeropol, called "Strange Fruit."  The opening verse goes:

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Sometimes we forget, or choose not to acknowledge, that such was a part of our country's not-too-distant past, and we forget how easily people who pride themselves as being "good, respectable, church-going folks" get stirred up by evil and hatred to kill string up another human being on a tree to die.  We forget how easy it is for "good people" to become a lynch-mob, while at the same time deluding themselves into thinking they are "righteous" and the ones in the nooses are the "accursed."  We deny the horror of what polite, "decent" people do in the name of preserving their picture of "decency," and how easy it is to cast the shame of it all onto the victims rather than on the perpetrators--to make everyone else feel like the ones left to hang are the cursed or wicked or shameful ones. We do not want to face that such things happened in our "free" and "enlightened" country of "liberty and justice for all."  I can only assume it is that willful (and cowardly) ignorance of our own history that allows folks in my own neighborhood and on the roads I regularly travel (in the unequivocally Union state of Pennsylvania) to put Confederate flags on their cars or fly them in their yards thinking that the motto "heritage, not hate" printed on the stars and bars makes a shred of sense or cleanses the symbol of its violent past associations.  No, Billie Holiday's voice ringing in my ears will not let me be comfortable like that any longer.

And, like I say, it is that image she conjures up that helps me have a fuller understanding of the scandal of the cross. In these days of Lent, I need the reminder that my Lord, too, was once hung on a tree like the strange fruit of a southern poplar. 

In so many ways, the Roman cross was simply a precursor to the lynching tree.  We forget sometimes, we Christians, how scandalous a thing it was for someone to be crucified in the first century.  We sometimes forget that it was horrifically common for the Romans to crucify people, as though there had only ever been one cross, or that Jesus' crucifixion looked noticeably different from the crucifixions of countless other enemies of the state. But of course, a great many who were deemed troublemakers by Rome were tortured and staked to trees, posts, and crosses, all across the empire, and it was designed to be as shameful a death as possible.  It was shameful, first of all, simply in all the ways the victim was dehumanized--stripped bare, beaten first, and left as a public warning to anyone else who dared get in the way of the Roman Empire (which prided itself on bringing "peace" to all the world, and to being a model of "decency" over against all the "barbarians" around it).  But beyond that, to Jewish watchers, a crucifixion was doubly shameful because of an old obscure commandment from Deuteronomy 21:23 "anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse."  The commandment itself in full said that anyone executed for crimes was thought to be accursed, and of course that meant that everyone watching at the crucifixion of Jesus came to the same conclusion: this homeless rabbi was cursed, wicked, and shameful.

Paul sees all of that going on in the crucifixion of Jesus.  Jesus himself takes the curse.  He absorbs its shame.  He is willing to be put in the place of every executed criminal, and of every victim of the lynch-mob in history.  He endures the vile actions of people who picture themselves as well-behaved, respectable citizens.  And at the very same time, the cross of Jesus exposes all of their violence for what it is--the real shame, and the real wickedness.

Too often people who think themselves righteous and decent commit unrighteous and indecent acts and praise themselves for doing them.  They are "preserving law and order" (as the Romans surely said).  They are "safeguarding their way of life and their heritage" (as the religious leaders in the Second Temple of Jesus' day surely said). They are "keeping their nation free from dangerous troublemakers" (as Pilate and Herod and plenty of pious folks all said when Jesus was crucified).  And so often, the supposedly "decent" and "respectable" crowd starts shouting "Crucify him!" and grabbing their ropes.  And all too often, too, the followers of Jesus have either gone along with it or just held their tongues in silence.

The scandal of the Gospel is of a God who enters into the midst of such a world and who chooses to identify with all the lynched bodies that hang from trees, whether Roman cross or southern poplar or whatever else the respectable-folk pick up next to use.  The scandalous message of the cross is that God chooses, not to look respectable but to become contemptible.  The Source of all blessing absorbs the divinely-pronounced curse by getting strung up on an execution stake.  The Righteous Judge bears the sentence of crooked cowards who think they have to kill Jesus to preserve the peace.

In these days, we need the voice of Paul, and maybe I need the voice of Billie Holiday to keep me from ignoring the scandal of what Paul has been saying, so that we will learn to find God in the places we do not expect God to be--not among the self-styled decent, respectable religious folks (who easily become a lynch-mob), but hanging from a southern poplar, and nailed to a Roman cross.

How will it change your day, and my mindset, and our outlook on the world, to pronounce the sentence: my Lord, too, was strung up like the strange fruit hanging from a southern poplar tree?

Lord Jesus, you who became a curse for us and placed yourself with all those who have been shamed and made accursed in human history, keep us from quiet willful ignorance and stir us up to go where you go, entering into the suffering of this world.  Thank you, Lord, for becoming a curse at our hands.