10 Comments
User's avatar
Virgin Monk Boy's avatar

Ah yes, the Lethal Injection Crucifix — a fitting relic for the age when Caesar wears a flag pin and Pharisees have talk shows. You wear empire’s hardware like a modern prophet, dragging Good Friday back to where it belongs: not in a pastel suburban sanctuary, but strapped to a gurney in Huntsville, Texas, humming with state-sanctioned voltage and theological malpractice.

You're not desecrating the cross, friend. You're un-domesticating it.

Jesus wasn’t nailed up to fulfill your megachurch blood contract. He was murdered by the machinery of empire because he dared to preach a kingdom that doesn’t run on fear, weapons, or stock portfolios.

Your crucifix? That’s not blasphemy — that’s rewilded Christianity.

The real offense isn’t your necklace.

It’s that we made the electric chair holy without noticing.

Blessed be the heretics who remember what the cross actually meant,

—Virgin Monk Boy

Expand full comment
Eric Folkerth's avatar

Thank you!

I sense you’ve caught the full gist of what I’m going for!

Appreciate that…..

Expand full comment
Indigo's avatar

I feel like my mind was just cracked open. In…in a good way.

Expand full comment
Eric Folkerth's avatar

😍

Expand full comment
No Goose-Stepping's avatar

I like it.

Expand full comment
Scott Elphingstone's avatar

“brilliantly uncomfortable” indeed. It’s been almost half a century since Reagan and the evangelicals of his day, and here we are.

Expand full comment
Eric Folkerth's avatar

For me, the Reagan/Evangelical “deal” is the modern equivalent of Constantine making Christianity the state religion. That “deal” served the same function in our time.

Expand full comment
Eric Folkerth's avatar

thanks, friend.

Expand full comment
Hollis Brown's avatar

Jesus Christ knew he was to die on the cross but went willingly. by refusing a defense before Pilate, he sealed his own fate to die by crucifixion.

in other words, he could have prevented his tortorous death but chose not to.

His Love for mankind was so great that he sacrificed himself to be the scapegoat for humanity’s sin and evil. He fulfilled the Old Covenant and birthed the New Convenant so that all may have Eternal Life.

have a blessed Good Friday everyone!

Expand full comment
Eric Folkerth's avatar

I absolutely believe that at a certain point Jesus becomes all but certain that he was to die.

I am also absolutely convinced this was not the cosmic plan, but the result of human sinfulness.

God overcomes that human sin through the resurrection.

But there was no need for a scapegoat.

And even if there was….my critique would be this: Christians and the rest of the world show no signs of stopping their scapegoating behavior toward “the Other.”

So, there is no credible evidence that, if it was a “once and for all attempt to end scapegoating…” that it worked.

But…God provides a resurrection for Jesus, emphasizing that God’s power is greater than our continual ability to create and scapegoat “the Other.”

And thanks be to God for that.

Expand full comment