If you visit Jerusalem, you will find many corners of the city where Franciscan caretakers say certain things happened: Jesus prayed in this olive grove here; he wept over the city there; he carried his cross along this covered, ancient, urban alleyway, now lined with shops for tourists.
There are two locations where tradition says Jesus was raised from the dead. One of them, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is probably the actual place. When you enter that church, you quickly come upon a stone slab where — or perhaps near the place where — the body of Jesus was prepared for burial. But if you turn to the right, you can climb a narrow, darkened, winding staircase that takes you up to a level of the church that encloses a hill, the hill, the hill of Golgotha. There, surrounded by a sea of flickering lanterns, you can glimpse — and even touch — some of the rock of the original hill, and say your prayers before an enormous, gilded icon of the crucified Christ.
This icon shapes the prayers of the Church, as it has done for centuries, and the longer you linger before it, the more closely it resembles not just a cross, but a Tree.
But if you really want to stand before a vivid Tree of Life, and say your prayers in the presence of the crucified Christ, you should go to Rome, and visit the Basilica of San Clemente. There you can view the magnificent 12th-century mosaic of the Tree of Life. Jesus hangs on the Tree, dying, but this Tree flourishes with life, surrounded by woodland creatures and people, even a young woman feeding her chickens.
Christians pray before this Tree, not just in Rome and Jerusalem, but really everywhere. The small, intricate gold cross on your necklace is yet another Tree of Life, yet another object of prayer and reverence.
Another tree stands today, in Jackson County, Florida — an oak tree, a tree of death, but maybe, if we gather around it and watch for a while, we might see that it is also a Tree of Life. Near the end of October, 1934, the body of Claude Neal was hung from this tree. He had already been lynched, brutally tortured and then shot multiple times. His body was then tied to a branch of an oak tree in the courthouse square, at the demand of a mob of white folk. He had been accused, tried, convicted, tortured, and killed by a gang of his fellow citizens, charged, with no evidence, of the murder of a young white woman. The mob craved the sight of his body hanging in abject humiliation. Like the ancient Romans, they appreciated the way in which a public hanging destroys the humanity, not just the dignity, of a victim. Neal’s body becomes, on this tree, a thing, not a being. Things, particularly dead or inanimate things, pose much less of a threat.
The people wanted to see this. The people wanted to do this.
A small few of the white onlookers resembled the women we find today in Mark’s telling of the Passion. They were appropriately outraged by this demonstration. Their presence, and their witness, is recorded. We know about them, and like the women at Golgotha, we are invited to stand alongside them. Their presence as witnesses and as objectors to the atrocity restores not only the humanity of Claude Neal; it restores their own humanity, too.
There is a current debate whether to tear down this tree in Jackson County. One side says that the tree is an awful symbol of outrageous, atrocious injustice, and its destruction would signal to everyone that the days of lynchings are behind us, or at least should be. The other side says that the tree should stand as a sober reminder that the monstrosity that led to the torture and murder of Claude Neal still lurks inside all of us, particularly those of us who have white privilege. The living oak tree can be an icon, a visual object that enables people of color and white people alike to pray, to intercede, to cry out in lament to God, for the sake of all victims, including our own victims.
There is another parallel here to the Tree on which Jesus was lynched: some local residents wonder whether this particular oak tree is actually the one that held on its branches the sacred, beloved-of-God body of Claude Neal. Local records are not conclusively clear, only 86 years later. Marianna, Florida, where Claude’s body was put on display, is, in this way too, another Jerusalem, one of countless Jerusalems where our victims are held aloft by trees: like so many Jerusalems, Marianna fades behind the uncertain, murky haze of faltering recollection. Maybe we just don’t want to remember atrocity, so we don’t faithfully hold all the facts together in a coherent narrative. In any event, several trees do stand today in that courthouse square, and like the land occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the very soil holds a clear memory of what happened there, what was done there, who was lynched and humiliated there.
I am firmly on the side of those who want to keep the tree. How could I not be? I am a Christian: we keep our trees around. We gather every year with the women at Golgotha around one particular Tree. We gaze not with grotesque fascination at the Victim hanging there, but with horror, and sorrow, and maybe even a cold, hard recognition of our own complicity in the death, however unconscious or unintentional it might have been.
Do my victims hang on this Tree?
Who even are my victims?
—The ones who go without food because I have more than I need.
—The ones who make less per hour than me, or the ones who suffer brutality at the hands of law enforcement while I escape this fate, because I am white and cisgender and male.
—The ones I insulted or belittled, or gossiped about, or denied or ignored in their darkest hour, or simply left alone because I didn’t really care.
I read out this litany of my victims precisely not to indulge in awful, grim, shameful self-hatred. God beholds God’s human family, and God proclaims humanity to be very good. God looks with mercy even on those who perform lynchings. It is a bracing, awful mercy! God’s mercy demands reform, and that is truly, monumentally difficult. But God offers mercy nonetheless.
But we do well to notice who our victims are.
And so we gather around this Tree, year after year. We call the Tree bearing Jesus a lynching tree, as the theologian James Cone so rightly charges us to do. Gathered fearfully some distance away from the cross, we could imagine the Galilean women still quietly singing a song of “Hosanna in the highest,” for ‘hosanna’ is a Hebrew word that means ‘God, save us.’ ‘Hosanna’ works for triumphant parades and grievous traumas, both. Hosanna: God, save us.
We then watch with the women as God transforms the lynching tree into a Tree of Life: pulsing with God’s resurrecting energy, this Tree bears the fruit of conviction and reform for the oppressor, the fruit of resurrection for the victim, and the fruit of restorative justice for all. God is powerful in the life-giving fruit; God lives along the shade-giving branches; God moves deep inside the hearts of the gathered women; God is beckoning the disciples who fled; and God is stirring the consciences of the anxious and angry oppressors who leveraged state-sponsored violence to destroy one whom God so loves.
But God ultimately is found here, precisely here: God is powerfully dwelling in and with the body of the Victim, bearing with perfect humility this most awful death, so that through this death, everyone will rise up in life.
And so, yes, we want to keep this Tree standing. We want to gaze at it for a long time. We want to sing once again this ancient song of praise to this beloved, this glorious, Tree:
Faithful cross above all other,
one and only noble Tree,
none in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peer may be.
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
sweetest weight was hung on thee.
***
Mark 11:1-11 | Psalm 31:9-16 | Philippians 2:5-11 | Mark 14:1-15:47
One source of information about the lynching of Claude Neal, including the speculation about whether the actual tree is still standing: https://dothaneagle.com/jcfloridan/news/local/debate-on-over-hanging-tree-s-fate/article_7c842e84-c2b8-5dd7-8af7-e45562e1cc13.html.
Header photo: Oak tree on the courthouse lawn, Jackson County, Florida. Photo by Valerie Crowder.
Calvary chapel, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.
The Tree of Life, Basilica of San Clemente, Rome.
Detail, the Tree of Life, Basilica of San Clemente, Rome.