I Refuse to Wear a Cross
How being the mother of a prisoner has changed me
*Earlier this week, our family experienced a sudden and tragic loss. This post was written in advance of these events. Please have patience with my response time, and thank you always for reading.
If Jesus were brought to trial and condemned today, we would not frame pictures of a figure hanging on a wooden cross. No, we would have to iconize an empty white garment draped over a metal gurney.
His death was a state-sanctioned, politically-endorsed execution.
But nothing to see here—the rainbow eggs and jelly beans are back!
It is time to pull our white shoes from the closet and dig out the pastels. Those of us who believe or kinda believe or try to believe or used to believe but still do the family obligation thing will shimmy into our Sunday best, gather together, and hug all of the peoples inside the steeples. We will join in song and celebration—the tech team and floral swags, on point.
We have dutifully ordered more basket filler and yard toys from Amazon (an evil incarnate) but, hallelujah, the loan came through just in time to make a down-payment on the Easter ham after the St. Patrick corned beef put us in the hole last month.
It’s all watercolors and bluer skies, birth and renewal and the hope of things to come—what a beautiful season to celebrate a human execution. Because, like it or not, Easter is fundamentally about crime-and-punishment.
Before we get to the third day, we have to walk through the first day and witness Jesus’s death as it was intended—an example of how power elites deter social uprisings and regime change by the poor, dirty, rebel outsiders.
And that is all well and good if you take comfort in the redemptive possibilities offered by Jesus’s life and his progressive message, but the chocolate crosses in the grocery store check-out are a bit over the top. Someone, somewhere in a corporate meeting actually pitched the idea of making a candy mold of a human torture device.
And then they marketed it.
Since my son went to prison, I have refused to wear a cross.
You can call me too sensitive or ridiculous or even sacrilege, but until you are in my shoes maybe don't. God may very well have allowed the political torture of his own son, and you may find solace in the symbolism, but if that God knows my heart (and any God worth worshiping would) he sees why I can no longer stomach—let alone promote—governmentally sanctioned blood lust by adorning myself, in all things, a silver cross.1
There were no Catholics at the death of Jesus.
There were no Evangelical Christians there either.
Shockingly, no one at the murder of Jesus was wearing a cross at all. Not even his closest friends and family—which was, in reality, a whole bunch of moms and aunties.2
For me, Easter is about a middle-aged woman watching her son be dragged before the courts. It is a seasonal spotlight, if not for all of its nostalgia, on what man has historically done to other men in the name of ‘justice.’
I find it rather confusing to look around in the Year of Our Lord 2026 and see that it is the Christians in the crowd still chanting for the Death Penalty. God Bless Texas and the whole Bible Belt still wants to fund harsher prisons and DeSantis down in Florida with his “swift justice”— what a God-fearing man they say.
What Would Jesus Do?
Well, there are clues.
A first-century doctor named Luke interviewed eyewitnesses to Jesus’s final hours. He reported verbatim what people heard Jesus saying to the filthy, lying, thieving criminal next to him: “I’ll see you later at my house.”3
Then there was that one time the religious leaders dragged some poor woman accused of adultery to the center of town and literally threw her in front of Jesus—asking him to endorse the death penalty on her for a “crime” that would have involved not just her but a [conspicuously absent] male counterpart.
Jesus responded, and I quote, “If you’ve never done anything wrong, go ahead.”4
Awkwardly, everyone just left.
Jesus also told a whole bunch of tattle-tale, lawyering zealots to “Stop worrying about other people’s failures and deal with your own.”5
His enduring message was flat out—judge less harshly, forgive more, have mercy on other people. He flipped tables over abuses of power. And wait for it—he died to offer redemption.
The Bible fails to mention chocolate bunnies, but it does feature a few text threads about goats. Specifically, it talks about sacrificial goats and frankly, I think Russel Stover has missed an incredible merchandise opportunity here.
In Jesus’s time, during the annual purification ceremony of Yom Kippur, it was Hebrew tradition for an official to strap the “sins” of the community to a poor, unsuspecting goat which was then led out of town and abandoned to die a horrible demon-death in the wilderness somewhere far, far away from the people who had strapped all of their crap to its back.
They called Jesus the Sacrificial Lamb as a result of that heinous tradition—Behold him who takes away the sins of the world, and all of that.6
What kind of barbarians would do such a thing?
Well…
It’s us.
The idea that society must symbolically transfer human wrongdoing onto another—animal or person—as an act of atonement is now American. We are still very much scapegoating. We have even monetized it and convinced good people that it is patriotic.
Every day, we bundle up all of the sins that we, the chosen few, have deemed abominable: addiction, sexual deviancy, shoot—add poverty and mental illness in there too, and then we cast the animals out. Go be somewhere else. Don’t get any of that on the rest of us. Die alone, and we'll call it justice.
We should just own it, friends—we are Old Testament folks, not a nation of “Jesus followers” because if you believe that Jesus was capable to take away the sins of the world that means that you have to believe anyone can be redeemed and restored in real-time. Not “prayed for” and then injected with poison for their sins.
If you put on pastels and celebrate Easter, then you have to serve redemption for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the rest of the year too. Celebrating Easter means that we are responsible to come up with systems that search for redeemable qualities in people and offer them what Jesus offered—another chance to live and live with renewal and abundance and all of that weird Jesus Saves! stuff. Call me crazy, but a Christian nation should be doing Christ-like things.
I've no other way to say it—mass incarceration and capitol punishment violate the principals and examples and teachings of Christ's life, and our current criminal justice system renders his death useless.
It would take me weeks to unravel the arguments for and against the death penalty here and, frankly, I am not going to do that. You already believe what you believe about killing people for killing people based on what you have seen and heard and done (and what Insta accounts you follow) in this life. Your ideas about judicial homicide, are yours, and mine are mine.
This blog is not my attempt to convince anyone of anything.
But society deemed it necessary to cast my son into isolation to be hungry, beat-down, and shamed for his sins of addiction—with a whole bunch of their shit strapped to his back. Forgive me if I tend to see our country and all of its gross contradiction in full-color now.
I cannot stand talk of grace and redemption, when the people speaking those words vote for harsher judgement and steeper punishment for drug addicts.
Where is the mercy of the cross here, friends?
When I hear the stories of the men and women who have woken up to find themselves in prison this morning—including those on death row—I take note of their filthy childhoods, the squalor and poverty they have endured. I hear about unspeakable abuses upon them as children, where mental illness and disease and ‘undesirable’ genetic traits altered their understanding of the world. I hear of cycles of addiction and isolation and the abject failure of the adults who were supposed to care for them—foster systems, school systems, juvie systems.
I also know from personal experience that one moment, one bad decision can alter your life permanently. As a result, I could never be the first to throw a stone or flip a switch.
As the great writer and attorney Clarence Darrow once wrote, “I’ll believe in the death penalty when they start executing rich people.” And to his point, I think it's time that they just release the full Epstein list already.
Happy Easter, America!
Links to a few good books on the reality of American death penalty:
Crossing the River Styx (The Memoir of a Death Row Chaplain) by Russell Allen Ford
Last Words of the Executed by Robert K. Elder
Ironic given that Jesus was betrayed for about $300 worth of silver.
“Many women were there, watching from a distance. They had followed Jesus from Galilee to care for his needs. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph,[a] and the mother of Zebedee’s sons.” (Matthew 27:55-56) and “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” (John 19:25)
I had to stop halfway through. I will come back to finish this brilliant and important piece but I just wanted to say once again how much power your words have. Thank you for continuing to put them out there although I know it must be exhausting. You have been in my thoughts constantly. ❤️
🖤We need restorative justice for the low hanging fruit, our kids.