I am a devout Christian and I think perhaps it would have been a better idea *NOT* to kill Jesus.

I got this idea when I was listening to a podcast where a Jewish woman is being interviewed by a Christian progressive about how Christian antisemitism works. The Jewish woman said, "I will never rejoice about a Jew being killed or injured."

The gruesome and lavish detail of the cross and the accompanying torture presented by Christian conservative circles has always been strange to me. It's fair to say the focus seems often to be more on the crucifixion than on the resurrection-- or on the LIFE of Jesus.

The core of my faith is my love of Jesus and how His grace for me restores my ability to love myself and others. Yet Christianity is often encapsulated as, "rejoice that Jesus died, because that is what allowed Him to be resurrected."

For me there is something deeply and horribly offensive in the idea of rejoicing in the death of a loved one, no matter what subsequent positive events emerge from their death. I love Jesus, so I don't want to rejoice in His death, because that is how love works.

Love delights in the thriving of the beloved, not in the functional use of the beloved to our own benefit. "Jesus died for our sins," locates the importance of Jesus in His functional usefulness to us, rather than delight in His being for its own sake.

Traditional penal substitutionary atonement theology objectifies God, by presenting Jesus as significant because He was a functional tool for carrying out God's plans. It not only objectifies Jesus, but justifies the objectification of other humans throughout history.

I think it's important that we call out redemptive violence as being a myth. Violence is not redemptive. Jesus chose the path of nonviolence over and over despite tremendous pressure from all sides to do otherwise.

I think Jesus would actually be nauseated by the dominant modern-day belief that the most significant thing about Him was how violently He died.

The significance is in what He taught and how He loved.

The myth of redemptive violence has real-life consequences. Consider Nancy Pelosi saying that George Floyd's violent death was redemptive because of how much social change it caused. That comment (rightly) nauseated many Black people

And so it made sense to me that the Jewish podcaster was nauseated by how obsessed we are with the spectacle of a Jewish person (Jesus Christ) dying in a gruesome way. We are locating the significance of the minoritized person in the ability they have to die for our benefit.

Viewing minority's bodies as significant because of the way their death and life further some greater agenda or grand plan is absolutely the pillar and cornerstone of white supremacy.

The myth of redemptive violence supposedly offers consolation to the loved ones of victims by infusing the violence with a sense of meaning and purpose.

I view violence as actually and fundamentally being counter to meaning and purpose. It is of the darkness.

The arrest of Jesus, Luke 22:52: "Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders who had come for him, 'Have you come out with swords and clubs as if I were a bandit?'"

"'When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!'" Jesus continues, Luke 22:53.

Note what He's saying and not saying here.

Jesus is rebuking violence. He is rebuking the police. He is saying the proper order of things is studying in the temple of together. He is saying he does not deserve to be treated like a bandit when he is part of a community.

The response to Jesus to his violent death "this is the hour of the power of darkness," not "yay I get to be a martyr and fulfill this divine grand plan so it's all okaysies by me." Jesus very clearly says to the people who want to kill him, THIS IS WRONG.

He also has some fatalism going on like, this is inevitable, I knew this would happen, this was written down in the Scriptures that this was going to happen, I can't do anything about it other than submit to it.

But for unknown reasons, centuries of theologians have fixated not on the message VIOLENCE IS FATED rather than the message VIOLENCE IS WRONG and have somehow twisted "VIOLENCE IS FATED" into "VIOLENCE IS REDEMPTIVE"

If we believe violence is redemptive, what decisions do we make?

We're okay with the death penalty.
We're okay with starting wars.
We're okay with hurting one person to protect another, instead of trying to find an alternative solution.

So the myth of redemptive violence (which supposedly offers consolation to violence-ravaged communities by offering them a narrative of meaning in which to embed their trauma) becomes co-opted by darkness to justify what....

MORE VIOLENCE!!!

If violence creates meaning, let's have some more of it, says the forces of darkness-- and blithely creates martyr after martyr.

And the warped theology causes us to celebrate the deaths instead of mourn what their lives could have been.

You know what's the point of martyrdom? A dead martyr's words can be more easily twisted from their original meanings.

Dead MLK, as a revered martyr, can be quoted out of context by racists who want to pretend his work is done and everything is skippy-happy now