VICTIM OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE -- Daily Images of God--Lent 2022 Day 44 Good Friday April 15

 

Daily Images of God--Lent 2022

Day 44 Good Friday

April 15

VICTIM OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE

 

Sometime close to Passover in 33-35 CE, Jesus of Nazareth was executed in Jerusalem by soldiers of the Roman Imperial Forces occupying Palestine using a method of death by abuse reserved for slaves and non-Roman citizens thought to have worked for the overthrow of Rome: crucifixion.  This involved horrific beating and whipping followed by being affixed to a gibbet in a position designed to induce severe agony and eventually asphyxiation.  The condemned was affixed to the gibbet (which took various forms) by ropes or spikes through the wrists and heels.  After the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, according to Josephus, “the soldiers out of rage and hatred, nailed those they caught, in varying ways, another after another, to crosses [fixed upright gibbets with portable crossbeams], as sort of a joke.”  The horrific punishment, deemed by the orator Cicero to be so disgusting and gruesome that Roman citizens should not even have to think about it, let alone witness it or suffer it, was above all intended to dehumanize and humiliate the condemned as a warning to others.  The condemned was almost always stripped naked and exposed throughout the beating, the dragging of the crossbeam to the fixed upright, and the time actually affixed.  A small ridge attached to the upright at the level of the buttocks was intended to relieve the body weight restricting breathing and prolong the suffering.  It was occasionally called a cornu, or “horn” because often it was sharpened so that a victim forced to rely on it to breathe would have to impale themselves, a horrific detail recorded by Seneca the Younger.  Recent archeological discoveries of the ankle bones of crucified slaves show that the victims were placed spread-eagled on the upright with heels affixed to the two sides of the upright.   

Modern historians and theologians, inspired by feminist Biblical Studies and critical gender theory, have begun treating this Roman brutality as a form of sexual violence aimed primarily at humiliating and dehumanizing the victim by stripping them of any private, intimate space (and not necessarily giving physical gratification to the abuser).  Stripping the victim, flaying them alive with whips, making them beg for mercy when no mercy was to be had, spreading their legs to nail them on the sides of the cross, and publicly watching them squirm naked in agony, making a joke of their sufferings: all these elements suggest that indeed crucifixion was a form of sick sexual violence.   

The traditional Christian faith is that God on the Cross is a fellow victim with our human sufferings in this world, no matter how horrific.  These new readings of the crucifixion of Jesus make him a fellow sufferer with victims of sexual abuse as well.  The story of the resurrection to follow in two days thus becomes also a story of hope for recovery from abuse.