Jamin Bradley

“The worst thing about the massacre was killing my neighbor; we used to drink together.” said a Hutu mother as she reflected on killing the Tutsi children next door in the Rwandan genocide. “His cattle would graze on my land. He was like a relative.” But one day someone from the government told her that the Tutsis were her enemies, gave her a club to kill them with, and she did.

It feels impossible to conceive of this kind of level of madness. Perhaps we can wrap our minds around an individual case here and there, but a whole mob or nation losing their mind collectively is something else—or at least it seems so at first. But once we pause and look throughout time, we see Nazi Germany, the American lynching trees of white mobs, and the Roman crosses upon which Jesus himself was hung.

Until we truly make Jesus our King and our God, we will always naturally default to the worship of the kind of kings and gods that are capable of racism, wars, insurrections, concentration camps, lynching trees, and crosses. Jesus reminds us of this on Good Friday, as he stretches out his arms wide to suffer with the oppressed, as though to say, “You are capable of this.”

Such crosses, mobs, and spiritual energies still flow through the world today. May we have the ability to recognize it when we see it, lest we join in crucifying Jesus again. For “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”