What does Holy Week do with Christians?
Christians through the centuries have preached and penned countless theses about these seven days’ happenings between Palm Sunday and Easter. Understandably so. This week brims with high-stakes elements. Power. Oppression. Politics. Violence. Bodies. Race. Gender. God. Sin. Redemption. Church. Death. Life. These all step onto the scene and become entangled at the foot of a cross.
Most of the takes on Holy Week that I have encountered strive to find meaning in the inexplicables surrounding the brutal execution of Jesus of Nazareth almost 2000 years ago. The question that I find more urgent in the white supremacist America of 2022, however, is: What does Holy Week train Christians’ bodies to do? What choreographies of faith does it form in us?
Holy Week is not just—or even primarily—an intellectual exercise. It is sensed. It is felt. It is breathed and bodied.
How Christians move through Holy Week defines how faith moves through us. Our movements can inflict harm. They can stifle our faith or contradict our values. They can also help us pray, grieve, rage, heal, love, witness, and change. If Christians do not take time to consider what Holy Week teaches us to feel and flesh out, then we risk ignoring both the wounds that surface and the possibilities for transformation in how we do faith that impact our own lives as well as the lives of our neighbors.
When I reflect on the traditional approaches to Holy Week that shape white Christianity’s sanctuaries in the U.S., I see two common stories that draw white Christians more toward choreographies of complicity with systemic racism than toward choreographies of anti-racist resistance. Both of these stories arose in western church history long before American white supremacy was constructed, but their contemporary iterations in this social context yield positions and movements that undermine an anti-racist faith for white Christians.
The first story is salvific substitution. It goes like this: “All human beings are sinners in need of salvation. All of us deserve death because of our sin. But Jesus, the Son of God who was without sin, chose to take our place and to die on the cross to save each one of us. His death gives us the chance to have eternal life if we confess our sins, seek God’s forgiveness, and choose to follow Jesus as Lord and Savior.”
This story applies a spiritualized filter to the central events of Holy Week. It devises a theological explanation for the crucifixion that ignores its historical and political dimensions. It revolves around characterizations of sin, salvation, atonement, and eternal life that operate on a spiritual plane distinct from social and political life. Its script directs Christians’ attention to the state of their own individual interior souls and to the possibility of a life in another realm after death because of Jesus’s cross.
The second story is sacrificial love. It goes like this: “The cross shows us just how much Jesus loves us. Crucifixion was a painful way to die, and Jesus chose to endure the immense suffering of the cross as a sign of his great love for each of us. He even loved those who mocked him in the last moments of his life by petitioning God to forgive them. In his death, we see the premier example of true love. Anyone who wants to follow Jesus must be willing to follow his example of sacrificial love too.”
This story also presents a spiritualized take on Jesus’s death, but it emphasizes one concrete dimension of crucifixion: suffering. It zooms in on Jesus’s physical pain while ignoring other significant historical and political features of the mode of execution he endured. This story’s script directs Christians’ attention to the wounded, suffering body of Jesus, his love for them in offering his life, and the call to emulate him in order to truly love God and neighbor.
The first story positions Christians at a distance from the cross and resurrection. It encourages them to look on from afar at what God did through Jesus on their behalf. It teaches them to be thankful to be standing where they are with Jesus positioned where he is in their stead. It also advocates an individual-oriented and otherworldly perspective on the kind of salvation that God offers through Jesus, which renders relative and even irrelevant the social, political, and material realities of this world.
The second story positions Christians as front-row spectators of the crucifixion. It encourages them to magnify the scene to contemplate the pain that Jesus suffered. It teaches them to gaze at what the violence does to Jesus’s body and to read each wound and blow as evidence of his love for them. It promotes a perspective on love that entails commitment to sacrificing themselves like Jesus did, even to the point of suffering and death, and it prescribes praying for and forgiving perpetrators like those who physically and emotionally attacked Jesus.
With these initial postures and gestures in view, I want to turn to how these choreographies operate in the current context of systemic racism in the U.S. My question for these choreographies is this: What do these scripts encourage white Christians’ bodies to do beyond the bounds of Holy Week liturgies and in the thick of white supremacy’s maneuvers in American society?
In the choreography of salvific substitution, I see a set of movements that pave the way for white Christians to dismiss racial difference and to ignore racial injustice. This script potentially poises white Christians to stand at a distance from those who might share Jesus’s position as victims of state violence and execution today, persons who are disproportionally people of color. It can lead white Christians to read their social marks of privilege and power as both things to be thankful for and things that are irrelevant to what really matters: otherworldly security for their souls. Its spiritualizing mode encourages white Christians to inhabit a color-blind stance, which seeks to downplay race and ends up minimizing or denying racial inequities. It also inclines white Christians to separate themselves from their own bodies and potentially from other people as well for the sake of eternal life, which ends up concealing white power from them and enabling it to remain in place.
In the choreography of sacrificial love, I see movements that pave the way for white Christians to notice some features of the racial landscape but still take steps in it that leave racial injustice unchallenged. This script disposes white Christians to be spectators of events of state violence and execution. Its focus on sacrificial suffering can encourage feelings of grief among white Christians over contemporary incidents of state violence against people of color while suppressing critical reflection on systemic racism’s role. Its fixation on Jesus’s pain as a sign of his love for them can lead white Christians to privilege their own experience over the experiences of those who endure racial oppression. It potentially advocates that white Christians prioritize forgiving those who do violence against people of color—who are disproportionally white people and white-controlled institutions in the U.S.—at the expense of pursuing racial justice. It can also press white Christians to follow Jesus’s example by submitting to suffering violence at sites of marginalization that they may occupy on account of gender, sexuality, disability, or economic status.
Both of these choreographies construct postures, gestures, and practices of faith that fail to form white Christians to actively resist racism. Instead, they offer white Christians a script that enables them to ignore, avoid, dismiss, or minimize white power and racial oppression. At their worst, these choreographies open the door for white Christians to believe that their faith demands complicity with white supremacy. Ultimately, these pathways through Holy Week undermine embodying an anti-racist, socially just faith.
My point here is not to blame Holy Week for American white supremacy, to sort out who is racist and who is not, to shame or guilt anyone, or to reduce people of faith to puppets going through involuntary motions. My concern is this: If, God forbid, another incident of police violence against a black human being occurs, and the story that we white Christians tell about the heart of our faith has trained us to ignore the injustice surrounding Jesus’s crucifixion and instead fixate on the next life or on the love in his suffering, then how will we be equipped to recognize the injustice to which that black person is subjected and to act to prevent such injustice from happening again?
I believe that Holy Week has something to say to power, oppression, politics, violence, bodies, race, gender, God, sin, redemption, church, death, and life that Christians can actually live in within the white supremacist America of 2022. I believe that Holy Week has stories that show us a God going with powerless people into the horrors of betrayal, dehumanization, and unjust, violent death and there disempowering the systems that authorized these horrors. I believe that Holy Week has spaces for bodies to move through it and to experience liberation, justice, and good news for oppressed people working their way through their bodies. I believe that Holy Week formation can subvert white supremacy’s choreographies and aid Christians in resisting systemic racism.
But I also believe that James Cone is right when he says in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “We cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualizing it, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering, and death.” [1] I believe that John Biewen is right when he says in “Seeing White” on the Scene on Radio podcast, “All white supremacy needs to keep chugging along, even here in the 21st century, is for most white people to go about our lives being nice and being good non-racists.” [2] I believe that Ibram X. Kendi is right when he says in How to Be an Antiracist, “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle. . . . There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’” [3] I believe that Christians’ faith formation does not hold race- or racism-neutral status in a racially inequitable context; how we do faith contributes either to racial justice or to injustice. If we do not tune in to the racial significance of our Holy Week practices and develop scripts and choreographies that turn us toward anti-racism, then I believe we risk forming this week, of all weeks, toward undoing the very core of the faith we profess.
Updated April 11, 2022
Notes and References
1. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2011), p. 156.
2. John Biewen, “Seeing White, Part 14: Transformation,” Scene on Radio, podcast audio, Aug. 24, 2017, https://www.sceneonradio.org/episode-45-transformation-seeing-white-part-14/.
3. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (One World, 2019), p. 9.
This article is also indebted to the feminist and womanist critiques of suffering in theologies of the cross that Elisabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza discusses in her book Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. See Elisabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (Continuum, 1995), 97-128.
Header image of “Jesus Statue” is by Wesley Tingey on the Unsplash website.
