“Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.”-John Fugelsang

Probably the most tweeted and Facebook-shared quote of the week, this quip from actor, comedian, and spiritual progressive John Fugelsang gives voice to a particularly ironic feature of the current political debate: Many of those who hurled insults at the legislators who voted for health care reform will, on this Good Friday, be mourning in church services over the death of a revolutionary healer whose uncompromising generosity and compassion got him killed.

On Good Friday, Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, an event that over the years has become so sentimentalized, personalized, and spiritualized that its political significance has been all but lost, except perhaps among those of us most desperate for hope of an alternative to the violence, exploitation, callousness, and domination of our own current social order. But then, Jesus has always spoken most powerfully to the nearly hopeless and desperate.

In order to grasp the spiritual significance of the crucifixion, we must remember that Jesus was not some kind of airbrushed ancient guru surrounded at all time with soft lighting and an ethereal glow, or a friendly ancient Santa Claus figure who welcomed children onto his lap, but an iconoclastic, ragged, homeless healer and teacher known for inspiring prostitutes, criminals, lepers, and low-level government workers with a message of their own wholeness, essential sufficiency, and belovedness of God.

Nothing is more threatening to a colonizing force like the Roman empire than a colonized populace that is beginning to get a sense of its own wholeness and power, that is being restored to health, that is thawing from leprous numbness and beginning to feel again. When it became clear what Jesus was provoking, he had to be killed.

And let’s be clear. Jesus was not crucified by an angry Father-God as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity but by human beings bent on preserving their own power, status, and wealth. He was crucified by the Roman Empire, aided and abetted by local religious officials who benefited from the Roman occupation. Jesus was crucified to preserve the so-called Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, an oppressive peace that relied on the exploitation of the many for the benefit of a few. In this way, the power of the crucifixion is in its stark depiction of what we human beings are capable of doing to preserve our perceived privilege.

Good Friday is thus an opportunity for us to look at the crucifixions necessary to preserve the fiction of Pax Americana, or any false peace maintained by force, whether violent or hegemonic, including the so-called peace of the global free market. These crucifixions include the obvious “collateral damage” of war casualties and political prisoners (yes, we have them here–see IMPRISONED INTELLETUALS: AMERICA’S POLITICAL PRISONERS WRITE ON LIFE, LIBERATION, AND REBELLION). They also include sick people who can’t get healthcare, poor people who can’t get jobs without experience that they can’t get without jobs, young people of color raised without hope and shuttled early into the criminal justice system where they will be warehoused or killed, indigenous people whose cultures are ravaged by so-called development….

Parts of our very selves are crucified, made casualties to the perpetuation of the status quo–those parts that would cry out against the suffering of our fellow human beings and other forms of life, and that would rise up to assert our desire for a meaningful, connected, embodied life that consists of more than consuming prefabricated products, and that would refuse to medicate our despair with alcohol, food, overwork, and other substitute gratifications. Even most of us “liberals” and “progressives” have succumbed.

How do we resurrect our hope, our capacity for feeling, our love of life? If we do not place our faith in Pax Americana, or more accurately, in the prophesied trickle-down potential of the interconnected network of privileges that hold our global economic system in place, in what do we place our faith?

This is a deeply spiritual question, and one that we must ask if we are ever to speak lovingly and persuasively to the Tea Partiers and other opponents to compassionate social policy. Compassion is a very real threat to the current order. It will bring it down. Do we really have any deeply celebratory, loving, generous alternative into which to invite everyone?

So before we get too self-righteous over here, too content to point our fingers at those “in power,” or those “on the right,” who perpetrate the crucifixions that sustain empire, Good Friday holds the mirror up to us, as well, forcing us to look at the ways in which we are complicit in these and other devastations. How often do we make compromises with our values to preserve our financial security, our reputations, our positions, our comfort, and our fixed ideas about ourselves? Or simply to stay out of prison? And what dies as a result, in us and in others? How do we help to hold in place the skepticism that another world is possible?

The question remains: From whence comes the power, the resilience, the humility, and the hope to sustain us as we stand up to the consequences of noncompliance with empire and catalyze a real alternative?

This is the question I’ll be carrying with me into Easter this Sunday. How many others are longing for a resurrection?