(Guest post by asescalante)
Like the many before him who would fall, and the many after who will fall, Jesus falls. Under the weight of that which will eventually kill him he falls; this weight is not simply the physical burden of wooden beam(s), but is the weight of the Empire that would find the innocent guilty, the weight of your closest friends abandoning you in your time of need, the weight of public humiliation—the weight under which Jesus falls is the weight of physical, societal, psychological, emotional pain.
The failure of Jesus is the impossibility of his message: love your enemies; the kin-dom of God is within you; who is my mother? Paradoxical, confusing, and secretive, that which Jesus taught and lived was a message that’s whole intention was the subverting of that same weight that would later crush him.
May we fall; may we fail.
black flag theology 