The Gospels record two verdicts on Jesus. A Roman court condemned him and hung him up in public as a warning. Three days later God reversed that verdict by raising him from the dead. Black Christians have read the cross through both. As New Testament scholar Dr. Esau McCaulley explains it, they hold the cross as the place where Jesus died for our sins and also as the state’s execution of an innocent man. The resurrection then removes the threat such a state leans on most: the power to kill.
That is the line from a Roman execution to the way Black people are treated now. The fair question is whether the line runs through the biblical text or gets drawn on top of it. McCaulley’s reading holds up best when you start with what the passages say and only then ask what they mean for people who have lived under a law that threatened them with death.
Can one death carry two meanings?
McCaulley’s account of the Black reading of the cross begins with what all Christians share. Black believers, he says, have wrapped their arms around the central truth of the atonement: “That Jesus died for our sins, and because he died for our sins, we can be reconciled to God.” He points to the hymns that celebrate the blood as evidence that Black preaching has been traditional on this point.
The second meaning sits on top of that foundation. Coming out of slavery into freedom, McCaulley says, Black Christians “saw Jesus as the innocent one who suffered at the hands of the state.” They found in his death a critique of state power, and he is precise about how the two relate. The critique comes “in addition to the atonement,” he says, and he explicitly rules out reading it as a rejection of the atonement.
That order shapes how the text should be read. McCaulley also insists that “the death of Jesus only has meaning as a connection to a larger story,” the story that runs from God’s promise to bless all nations through Abraham, through the promise to David, to the King of Israel whose death reconciles us to God. A death cut loose from that story can be bent into almost any symbol. Inside it, the death carries both meanings because the story itself does: God’s plan to bless the nations, carried out through the unjust act of rulers.
Peter’s sermon at Pentecost says exactly this. Speaking to the Jerusalem crowd only weeks after the crucifixion, he describes Jesus as “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” and says that “by wicked hands” he was crucified and slain (Acts 2:23). One clause names God’s purpose. The other names human guilt. Peter feels no need to choose between them, and neither does the tradition McCaulley describes.
What do the Gospels say about Rome’s verdict?
The claim that Jesus was an innocent man executed by the state is no modern overlay. Luke goes out of his way to establish it. Pilate tells the crowd, “I find no fault in this man” (Luke 23:4). He repeats the point, and a third time he asks what evil Jesus has done and says, “I have found no cause of death in him” (Luke 23:22). Then he hands Jesus over anyway. After Jesus dies, the centurion in charge of the execution says, “Certainly this was a righteous man” (Luke 23:47).
Luke is writing narrative, and narrative makes its point through what it repeats. Here the repetition is relentless: the people with the authority to kill Jesus knew he had done nothing to deserve it. The cross, as Luke tells it, is a miscarriage of justice carried out by the legal machinery of an empire.
John adds an exchange that speaks directly to state power. Pilate presses Jesus: “knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee? Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:10-11). Jesus concedes that Pilate’s power is real. He denies that it is ultimate. McCaulley locates the courage of the abolitionists and the Civil Rights marchers in that same distinction: they went out “with the confident assurance that the state was not God, but that God was God.”
Why would the resurrection matter to a state that rules by fear?
McCaulley explains what crucifixion was for. Drawing on his reading, he notes that “the crucifixion was a public spectacle,” staged so that onlookers would conclude the same thing could happen to them if they stepped out of line. He names the threat that was used against Black people the same way: “If you don’t do what we say, we will beat you and we’ll kill you.” The parallel follows: “terror has historically been used as a means of controlling black bodies.”
If the cross shows the state’s power to kill, the empty tomb shows where that power runs out. Peter’s sermon makes the turn in the very next verse: “Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24). Holden is older English for “held.” The court that condemned Jesus could hand him over to death, and death could not keep him. McCaulley describes the result as “a defeat of a state because the state no longer has the power to control us by fear.” He puts it in the believer’s own voice: “The worst you can do to me is kill me. If you kill me, I’ll go and be with my Lord until I’m raised from the dead.”
Jesus says something close to this when he sends out the twelve. He warns them they will be handed over to councils and dragged before governors, and then tells them, “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28). The context matters. He offers no promise of safety. He prepares them for persecution by telling them that those who can kill them do not hold the final word over them.
Hebrews spells out the logic. Christ shared our flesh “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14-15). This passage needs careful handling. Hebrews names the devil as the one who held the power of death; Rome is nowhere in view. McCaulley’s application to the state extends the passage beyond its direct subject. The extension still follows the passage’s own reasoning. The bondage Hebrews describes works through fear of death, so any power that governs people by that fear depends on a threat Christ has already disarmed.
Is the comparison to Black suffering fair to the text?
The comparison works only if it respects the differences, and McCaulley insists on them. The training behind the lunch-counter sit-ins, where protesters absorbed insults without answering back, invites an obvious link to Jesus silent before his accusers. McCaulley accepts the link and qualifies it at once: “I wanna see the points of connection and the points of difference.”
The difference is power. “Jesus was not in the exact analogous situation of black people,” he says. Black Americans in 1950 were a minority who would have been crushed by a violent uprising. Jesus faced no such limit. “Jesus was God’s son, and had he wanted to call down the angels, the game would’ve been over.” Matthew records Jesus saying as much at his arrest, when he asks whether his Father would not send “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matthew 26:53).
So for McCaulley “it’s precisely the emptying of his power that makes what he did on the cross glorious.” The glory lies in the choice. Suffering alone does not make the cross what it is; the one who could have stopped it let it happen, and let it happen for others. Black suffering shares the shape of innocent suffering under the state. It does not share the atoning purpose that belongs to Christ alone. Blur the two, and either the cross or the people end up smaller than they are.
McCaulley applies the same discernment to James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. He credits Cone with showing that crucifixion and lynching were both instruments of terror, for Jews in the first century and for Black people under Jim Crow, while wishing Cone had given a fuller account of traditional themes like the atonement.
Doesn’t a crucified Savior teach people to stay passive?
This is the strongest objection, and it circulates widely in popular culture. If Christians are told to be like Jesus on the cross, silent and unresisting, the faith seems built to keep the oppressed in their place.
McCaulley’s main answer comes from the resurrection itself. Nonviolent resistance, he argues, has theological power only if Jesus rose. A nonviolent man who was killed and stayed dead would be a poor model. “But if Jesus was the one who loved his enemies and who died and who rose again, then that way of life is vindicated.” The resurrection amounts to God’s public approval of how Jesus faced his enemies. Without it, refusing to retaliate looks like losing. With it, that refusal becomes the path God honored.
He also rejects the equation of this love with weakness. The people who sat at those counters showed strength of character, he says, in giving up the right to respond for the sake of transformation. Drawing on Howard Thurman, he observes that hatred supplies energy but cannot be contained; it spreads until it turns on one’s own people and finally on everyone. Jesus refused hatred because he knew what it destroys. “Christian Love is not weak,” McCaulley says.
He adds a historical claim of his own: that a significant portion of the Civil Rights Movement’s leaders were Christians moved by their faith, which he takes to tell against the charge of docility. That history deserves its own careful treatment. His sharper point concerns the shape of the argument. The critique, he says, has persuasive power only on one condition: “for the persuasive power of that critique, it demands that the resurrection not be true.” Claiming God has done nothing for Black people assumes the Christian story is false before the evidence is weighed. In McCaulley’s view “the resurrection precedes what happened in America,” so the question of the empty tomb comes first.
The limit should be stated plainly. The resurrection does not promise believers escape from the state’s violence. Jesus told his followers they might be killed. What changes is what that violence can accomplish. It can still wound. It cannot issue the final ruling on a person’s life.
What follows for how Christians live now?
McCaulley pushes against a shrunken hope that looks only to heaven after death. “Resurrection is the defeat of death,” he says. “It means that God wants to reclaim every aspect of his creation.” He grounds this in Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15, where everything hangs on a bodily resurrection: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20). Firstfruits are the first part of a harvest, the pledge that the rest is coming. Paul’s point is that what God did for Jesus’s body he will do for his people, and McCaulley follows Revelation in extending that hope to a new heaven and a new earth.
From there he draws an application, and it should be read as application rather than exegesis. Christians live now in light of what is coming. If God will make creation new, believers act on that future in the present. When people are denied their rights, he says, Christians name it as contrary to how God made the world: “Therefore, we oppose this in the name of our king.” He is careful about what activism can claim. Believers do not build the kingdom. “And our activism now is to tell you what it’s gonna be like when he comes.”
Read this way, the cross does two things for people who have lived under a law that threatened them with death. It settles their standing before God, so no human court decides who they finally are. And the resurrection behind it drains the threat that such courts depend on. McCaulley calls the cross “a source of identification and a source of hope” for African American Christians, and he gives it a message for every power that rules by terror: “It says to the state, you can go here and no further.”
