“And they watched him die…”— Luke 23:35
This is not blasphemy. This is the mirror that empire avoids.
This is not a reenactment—it is a recognition.
In every age, the crucifixion continues. In every age, we must ask:
Where do we stand, and what do we see?
In a time when the cross has been weaponised into a tool of conquest, compliance, and control, I offer this lament as both a grief song and a rallying cry. I write not to reject the sacred, but to mourn its desecration—especially by those who claim to defend it while distorting its most radical truth: that Christ did not conquer through power, but through solidarity with the suffering. This lament is for those who are awakening, who are angry, who remember—or who long to. It is for those who still believe that love must resist empire, even when empire dresses itself in scripture. May this lament unmask the false triumphalism that infects our politics and our pulpits. May it call us back to the cross that connects, not the one that conquers.
Lament for the Cross
(A Rallying Cry for the Misled and the Remembering)
O cross, once drenched in the sweat of the condemned,
how did you become a brand logo for conquest?
You once stood naked on a hill,
a site of unbearable solidarity,
a quiet rebellion where God refused to play God.
Now you hang in marble halls,
framed in gold,
blessing bombs and billionaires,
used to silence dissent
and sanctify exploitation.
Forgive us.
We turned your protest into policy.
Your agony into advertisement.
Your radical “with-ness” into “us-versus-them.”
We wear you on lapels,
but do not carry you in our bodies.
We claim your blood,
but won’t touch the wounds of the world.
We kneel at your altar,
but pass the hungry without looking.
We preach your power,
but flee your powerlessness.
And still you whisper:
“I was not nailed up to make you kings.
I died between thieves, not senators.
I cried out to a God who did not intervene—
not because the divine had abandoned me,
but because it had entered the suffering,
fully, irrevocably, forever.”
You were never about triumph.
You were about truth—
raw, unvarnished, inconvenient truth.
The kind that can’t be monetised or militarised.
So let this be said to every counter-elite
hiding their empire behind a verse:
Your gospel is hollow.
Your victory is theft.
Your revolution is a rerun
of every bloody bait-and-switch
that draped a flag over a corpse
and called it freedom.
And let it be said to those with ears to hear:
There is another way.
Not back, not forward—but deeper.
To the wood.
To the body.
To the breathless moment between betrayal and forgiveness.
To the cross that does not conquer—but connects.
Let the false cross burn in the fire of your grief.
Let the real one rise—not as a monument, but as a mirror.
Look into it.
Weep.
And then—
walk.
*****
If this lament stirs something in you—grief, memory, fury, longing—I invite you to share it.
Speak it aloud. Post it forward. Let the false cross fall. Let the real one be remembered.
Profound thanks to ChatGPT(4o) from OpenAI for assistance with this article.
