Galilean Dawn on Death Row, USA
A "Holy Week" Sermon for Mumia Abu-Jamal
by Professor Mark Taylor
Princeton Theological Seminary
Text: "And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right
side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them,
'Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has
risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him.
But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to
Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you." Mark 16:5-7
"Easter" is showing up at a scene of death, and finding Life - surprising
and stubborn, defying all expectations.
Come with me now to consider one scene of death, death row USA, now
holding over 3600 persons. On average, 2 people per week are executed,
sometimes 2 or 3 in a single day - and all this while study after study
finds capital punishment biased as to race and class, that it neither
deters murder, nor (according to murder victims' families themselves)
creates healing closure. In recent news, European nations announce they
are appalled at the hypocrisy in U.S. claims to be the "bulwark of
democracy and freedom" while making common cause with Afghanistan,
Pakistan, China, Iran and Iraq in the grisly use of the death penalty.
It is time for Christians to stand up against this unfair system of death,
which only compounds the gruesome unfairness that murderers have already
caused to victims and their families. Christians who resist the death
penalty, however, will also need courage to resist the power of the
State, a State that wants today to dramatize its absolute power over life
and death through frequent application of the death penalty.
Even though many Christians support the death penalty, I submit that this
support is a betrayal of the Gospel. It is to miss the spirit of
resistance for life, love and justice that Jesus stood for and for which he
died. In fact, to advocate the death penalty is to lend support to the
same kind of powers that worked the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The
real Easter message is that we Christians have another kind of power, the
power of life to withstand the worst that an executing, terrorizing state
can throw at us. It is a power to build a new kind of life, new movements,
new social and political orders where love and justice for all are really
practiced.
But still, many Christians support the executing State. One resident of
today's death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal, has himself pointed out how strange it
is for alleged followers of the executed Jesus to be supporting executions
today. Mumia has been fighting for his life for 18 years on death row,
against his much-contested conviction for the shooting death of
Philadelphia policeman, Daniel Faulkner. His requests for a new trial are
called for not only by his long-time supporters, but also by the normally
cautious human rights organization, Amnesty International, and even by a
research lawyer writing for the mainstream, American Lawyer magazine. As
Mumia awaits a Federal court decision this April 2000, about whether he
will finally get the new trial that activists the world over have pressed
for, we Christians during our "passion week" do well to meditate on Mumia's
words from Pennsylvania's death row.
Isn't it odd that Christendom - that huge body of humankind that claims
spiritual descent from the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth - claims to pray to
and adore a being who was prisoner of Roman power, an inmate of the
empire's death row? That the one it considers the personification of the
Creator of the Universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten and crucified on a
barren scrap of land on the imperial periphery, at Golgotha, the place of
the skull? . . . That the majority of its judges, prosecutors, and lawyer -
those who condemn, prosecute and sell out the condemned - claim to be
followers of the fettered, spat-upon, naked God?
Brothers and sisters, according to the Gospel of Mark, our "risen lord" is
this "fettered, spat-upon, naked" Jesus, mentioned by Mumia. Note how
Mark's Gospel actually prompts us to follow this Jesus and so manifest the
resistance Mumia has shown in his own struggle and writing.
"Fettered, Spat-Upon, Naked God"- Returning to Galilee!
When the women in this story come upon the tomb, they are surprised to
encounter a "young man in a white robe." We are given no explanation about
who this is, but most significant is what this strange figure says about
where their Jesus is to be found.
The young man points them toward Galilee. Easter dawns with a word about
Galilee. The surprised mourners are not told, "Well, Jesus is in heaven
now." Nor are they instructed, "Jesus is somehow up on some supernatural
plain above you all." No, they are simply, but dramatically, told: "he is
going before you to Galilee."
To Galilee! To understand the drama of this, we need to hear that word,
"Galilee" with all the startling, explosive connotations that it would have
had for the hearers of Jesus and Mark. Galilee was not just a quiet
pastoral scene where some gentle Savior-Shepherd did some teaching.
No, Galilee was a site of daily suffering and resistance. Galilee was a
district where the rural poor suffered poverty and indebtedness. Galileans
offered up their desperate, forced labor, their foodstuffs and animals, to
service the religious and political system of the privileged who lived in
the urban centers. Their lives were extracted from them on a daily basis.
Galileans were living sacrifices to a system where local elites (political
and religious) joined with the imperial system of Rome and its brutal
tyranny.
Jesus emerged among these Galilean poor, refusing to give legitimacy to
either the Roman presence, or the Jewish aristocracy that cooperated with
it. Jesus did not sanction mystical sects that taught withdrawal from
political struggle and engagement. But he joined neither the social
bandits of Galilee, nor those zealots whose revolutionary aim was to
restore the Jewish nation-state.
Whatever you think of the kind of revolutionary Jesus was, it cannot be
missed that he challenged both the political and religious authorities of
his day. Jesus dramatized precisely this when he began his last trip into
Jerusalem by bursting into the temple scene. He overturned its
money-changing tables, and announced that the whole religious and political
system built around the temple violated the love and justice of God taught
by the great prophets.
The Roman overseer, Pontius Pilate, who first did not really fear Jesus as
any threat, was eventually made sufficiently nervous during the Passover
tumult, and, finally, was persuaded by religious elites to do away with
him. All authorities were nervous during Passover because the populace was
commemorating their deliverance from Egyptian slavery, now groaning under
Roman repression. A nervous Pilate thus handed Jesus over to his soldiers
for execution.
But now, this Jesus is announced from an empty tomb, as going back -
"before you to Galilee." The place of struggle and resistance, Galilee, is
where the Life is. The life of Jesus, "resurgent" in Galilee, could only be
heard as also a life "insurgent" against that system of oppression that so
bound and repressed Galilee. The resurrection and insurrection of love and
full life for all, go hand in hand.
Easter morning, is about the dawning of life, the power of the God who is
Life, to be resurgent and insurgent amid political powers that take to
themselves absolute political and religious power.
Why Jesus Was Executed
Let us not forget why Jesus was executed, nor why his resurrection must be
celebrated as the ever-new finding of life amid resistance to empire.
In the Rome of Jesus' day, crucifixion was, as one historian puts it, "a
kind of public service announcement. It read: "Do not act up against
authority, neither that of Rome directly, nor against that of any
respectable power (religious, social, economic) that is indirectly crucial
to Roman control. If you do act up, your fate will be similar to these
tortured, crucified ones." And so, clusters of the executed on poles were
found routinely at crossroads of empire, these gibbets of death by torture,
freshened regularly by new victims, all to remind everyone one of the
terrible price of insubordination.
Jesus was executed because he embodied a way of love and justice that
challenged nearly all authority, religious and political. He got the
punishment reserved not just for common criminals, but for the seditious
and rebellious among them. Jesus' may not have been a concrete and
political revolutionary in all the ways we know now, or that were known
then, but his embodied messages of love and justice were revolutionary
enough to get him executed by authorities.
Remembering our executed Jesus, is to remember that executions, like Roman
crucifixions, are designed to terrorize the downtrodden, to keep them
locked down in fear - in body, mind and spirit. In Rome, these executions
were all about creating a "theater of terror" to keep in line the unruly
and restless poor.
Why We Have Death Row USA Today
You say, but it is different here and now, in the USA of the year 2000. You
may think: there is no reason for the powers today to terrorize us with
executions. I submit to you that the opposite is true. I say that many of
the powerful of our land, those who occupy our government and other
positions of economic and political control, have every reason to terrorize
us with a penalty that gives to the State an authority over life and death.
The history of executions in this country is rooted in widespread practices
of lynching which were just plain "racist," yes; but also served to
terrorize a subordinate people who needed to be kept in slavery, or who,
after "emancipation", needed to be kept in various situations of forced
labor.
Check out our history. Notice how often executions, official or
unofficial, have been used in U.S. history to intimidate oppressed and
potentially unruly groups. Official executions have been most frequently
applied in our society when capitalist periods of economic overdrive
(officials call this "economic growth") yield new levels of poverty and
create restless and unruly populations of the poor. These populations,
seen by the powerful as so much "social junk" or feared as "social
dynamite," have always had to be controlled. A State power that executes
freely, to prove itself the ultimate authority of life and death, is one
way to assert this control. More prisons are another way; brutal policing
tactics still another.
Brothers and sisters, this is where we are today. While more wealth
circulates now in the U.S. than in any other country, more of our citizens
are below the poverty line than in any other industrialized country. The
gap between rich and poor in the USA has been widening dramatically over
the last three decades, and still is widening. Wage inequality is growing
at a faster rate in the U.S. than in any other industrialized nation. The
middle class is shrinking faster here than in any other industrialized
country. The Childrens Defense Fund, studying the impact of the hatchet job
done on the already imperfect welfare system, now shows that 400,000 more
U.S. children have slipped into the category of "extreme poverty."
Brothers and sisters, there is every reason for powerful groups in our land
to fear new, unruly populations that have become more desperate in their
hunger and sense of powerlessness. This is why, during the same time as
the recent widening division between classes, we have also seen our prison
population triple since 1980, police brutality rising, executions becoming
routine.
Today's frequently-used death penalty is functioning as crucifixions did in
Jesus' day, as part of a "theater of terror" to keep us all worshiping the
power of the State, to keep us all from resisting what economic and
political powers do today. By regularly executing some (almost always the
poor, and usually the black, brown and red, but also juveniles, the
mentally retarded and even the innocent), the State sends signals to
everyone in society that it is the ultimate power over everyone's daily
lives.
The Power of a Galilean Dawn
But brothers and sisters, if you understand Easter power, the State will
not succeed. It may try to inculcate us into revering it as ultimate power
over life and death. It may try to inoculate us against resistance. But
Easter is dawning. If you have heard the Gospel of Mark, you know Life is
ever resurgent and insurgent, going before us to Galilee.
There is a Galilean dawn that State power has to recognize, and this dawn
means the end of the power of the state to tyrannize us through executions.
It is the power of resistance that was the power of the kingdom of God,
which no State execution stopped or has the power to stop. The power of
life and resistance, especially as embodied in the radical love and justice
of Jesus, is greater than the power of the State.
The power of the Galilean dawn is a greater power that is also a "deeper
power," rooted in the very power of creation itself. Nature is a friend to
our moving against injustice, a point stressed time and again by Martin
Luther King, Jr., when he said that "the arc of the universe" itself "bends
toward justice." Mumia Abu-Jamal meditated on the same phenomenon when he
witnessed nature's storms bringing a relieving darkness to his entire
prison while he was on "Phase II" of death row in 1995, leading him to
write of nature's power over that of the State.
The greater power of Galilean dawn is also a "wider power," that is, one
alive and catalyzed in a broad array of peoples' movements organizing
against repressing forces from all sides. You and I are invited to enter
those movements, to be part of that wider power. In so doing, we follow
our executed Jesus back to Galilee, and so participate in the creation of
our own "Galilee" here. The Galilean dawn is irrepressible.
Prisonland America needs a real Easter, a people resurgent and insurgent,
returning to "Galilee" - the land where resistance and Life flourish
together. Look around and you will see a flourishing of resistance among
many who are not intimidated by State power's new prison industry or its
death penalty habit. Against the resistance of Easter coming, the State's
brutalizing efforts are futile. Mumia Abu-Jamal - through his own fight
for life, and as a voice for others without voice, is a living witness of
that spirit of resistance. When we all join in that spirit, we will
strengthen, and be strengthened by, a greater, deeper and wider power that
the State cannot quash.
Welcome the Galilean dawn. Christ is risen. Life is resurgent and
insurgent. By the same power that raised the executed Jesus back into his
Galilee, we, too, will stand in the fields, towns and cities of our own new
Galilees. We will not fear police intimidation, the terrors of prison, nor
the death rows of the USA. We and all life will flourish without them!
Mark Taylor is Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological
Seminary, and ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). A
version of this sermon, with documentation and footnotes, can be had by
writing him at Princeton Seminary, P.O. Box 821, Princeton, NJ 08542.
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