{Good Friday…and this series of casual, unplanned, personal yet “blogly” public writings about “room(s)” is coming to an end. One more, tomorrow. But there is today, and I am wondering how to write about my chosen 2024 topic on Crucifixion Day. Let’s see what happens, shall we?”}

The soldiers brought Jesus to Golgotha, meaning “Skull Hill.” …They nailed him up at nine o’clock in the morning…Along with him, they crucified two criminals, one to his right, the other to his left. People passing along the road jeered…

Gospel According to Mark 15:22 25, 27, 29; from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, “The Message”

In 1982 I was the keynote speaker at the Montreat Youth Conference, a denomination-wide youth event held in the Presbyterian “Mecca,” Montreat, NC. The theme of the conference that year was “Cross Connections,” and I was to speak each day before about 1000 teens and their adult leaders. (The annual conference was so popular, we held an identical gatherings the following week.) I had worked with the conference planning committee to come up with a topic each day related to the broad theme. Then, I took a few days in a retreat of sorts to write at my friend Jim’s place in a D. C. suburb. As I recall, the conference went very well. I even had a minister in the crowd who said (and this was a very high compliment), “Your presentations remind me of Frederick Buechner.” But there was also criticism following one morning’s keynote.

I had taken Malcolm Boyd’s book The Alleluia Affair and turned it into a dramatic reading, with parts assigned to a team of youth and a couple of adults. (I may have asked the publisher for permission, but that detail is lost in foggy memory banks. Let’s say I did.) The book begins with Jesus pulling himself off a large crucifix cross in an Indianapolis church, then from a Manhattan church, and sixty churches in Paris. From San Francisco to Sydney, Prague to Peking, Jesus pulled free from church crosses and walked into the streets. The world’s religious leaders reacted with consternation, issuing all kinds of verbose counsel and warnings. Boyd says, “People ignored the religious leaders, preferring to confront Jesus in the streets and talk to him face-to-face.” He’d be in a diner, for example, breaking bread in the form of a hamburger roll and sharing coffee.

Then the Jesus figures portrayed in stained glass windows throughout Christendom came alive and shattered the glass and leaped out and dove into humanity, wearing prison stripes, joining migrant workers, selling tickets in bus stations, staying at YMCAs, and getting temporary work permits. The world reeled, and faith became alive for millions.

Under the empty crosses and the broken windows, scrolls were found, all with words from the teachings of Jesus. “When you give a feast, invite the poor…” “Judge not that you be not judged.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”

Boyd’s writing then takes a turn when suddenly people find on those empty crosses people whose stories we’d rather not hear. The crucified of our culture. A starving child. An unmarried teen mother scorned by her family. A black man in prison stripes, a woman clad in jeweled high fashion, but drunk. An untouchable from Bombay. An abused youth.

Interestingly, the critical response I received from one adult in the youth conference masses wasn’t about the empty crosses or the newly crucified of our times, but Boyd’s targeting of larger, more affluent churches. The critic had come from one of those churches. He was probably right: the book aimed its complaint toward the more prominant churches and church leaders like bishops and denominational execs. But the book’s imaginative premise was nonetheless a powerful reminder that we as a society do condemn Jesus’ sisters and brothers to crosses we have fashioned from our bigotry, racism, and all manner of injustices.

When I had first moved to our retirement home, I had to find a new barber. I chose the one in the heart of the shopping district. One morning, his TV was reporting on Barack Obama’s initial run for the White House. With my haircut finished, I headed for the door and the barber said to me, “I know what we can do with that guy! Get some wood and matches, right?” I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak. (Damn it.) But I never went back.

You see, there is still room on Skull Hill for those with whom we disagree politically, those we’d rather not have living next door, and those whose complexion or gender identity or mental confusion breeds fear in our hearts. I could use this crucifixion day to name my enemies, the ones Jesus said it’d be best to love. I could name names. “Lock ’em up!” “String ’em up!” I confess I have a collection of nails. But instead of hearing my confession, why not listen to your own heart.

God so loved the world, the cosmos, every creature, so much that God gave the Son…who walks among us now, as the beloved, the unknown, the condemned, the ignored, the hungry, the job-less, the victim and the perp, and the room-less. Lord, when did we see thee…? Or, maybe we’d think, “Lord, if you’d just go back to your place in the stained glass…wouldn’t that be a more holy dwelling place for you? And less threatening for us?” We could then blend our voices in singing, “Beneath the cross of Jesus…”

But now. I must examine my own heart. How much more room is there on that hill?