James Cone speaks powerfully of what it means to truly understand redemption, both personal and social, spiritual and cosmic, as coming through the cross of Jesus. According to him a twofold imagination is required to actually live out and believe the idea of life arising out of death, newness out of darkness:

One has to have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy. What kind of salvation is that? No human language can fully describe what salvation through the cross means. Salvation through the cross is a mystery and can only be apprehended through faith, repentance, and humility. The cross is an ‘opening to the transcendent’ for the poor who have nowhere else to turn—the transcendence of the spirit that no one can take away, no matter what they do. Salvation is broken spirits being helped, voiceless people speaking out, and black people empowered to love their own blackness.

And yet another type of imagination is necessary—the imagination to relate the message of the cross to one’s own social reality, to see that ‘They are crucifying again the Son of God’ (Heb 6:6). Both Jesus and blacks were ‘strange fruit.’ Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the recrucified body of Christ. Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our miles, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross. (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 158-59)

I think Cone’s challenge to Christians in America, particularly white Christians in America is the right one, and it is rightly framed under the call to powerful imagination. What if our fundamental task is to be able, through this double imagination of the cross to discern where are the crucified people among us? And then to learn how to be among them, to stand with them, to cease recrucifying them, and instead work with them unto a new life that we await, imagine, and hope for?

Are we really interested in looking to see where the crucified people are among us? Or does that sort of imagination ultimately not interest us? Do we really just not want to see the recrucifying with which we are all complicit, whether passively or actively? I know I don’t care for seeing such things. But we must if we are to be able to imagine redemption in a truthful way. Cone is right. A powerful imagination is indeed necessary. Who are the crucified among us? This needs to become our constant question and search and commitment.