Jesus walked and talked differently. As a matter of fact, his first language preceded syntax. More than often Jesus spoke without grammatical speech. The deepest meanings that he shared about God and others were embedded in “somatic” language. His strange birth and horrific death on the cross spoke loud and clear without any grammatical interference. His body spoke.

We need verbal sounds to make ourselves known. Our spoken language connects us with others, but we are not mere creatures of our verbal repertoires. When we grasp that we must also embody our grammatical sounds (and feel our thinking!), we’ll begin to understand Jesus in fresh ways. From non-verbal to verbal — this is how we could experience and articulate Jesus’ embodiment of God’s kingdom from a different perspective.

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There’s nothing wrong with ambition, progress, technology and the creation of wealth as such, but when personal ambition is pursued at the expense of others, it’s very wrong — end of story! It happens far too often. South Africa is a country where the First World and the Third World meet (and clash!) every day; a country where you have two parallel universes living in constant tension and harmony (!) next to each other. I realize how important it is to sensitize people to the circumstances of those who suffer extreme poverty. For too many people life here in South Africa is a daily struggle to survive. To them “Survivor” is definitely not a reality program watched by millions of others in the luxury and comfort of their living rooms. The winner in the real African struggle of survival does not walk away with the first prize of a million rand. No, these ‘winners’ merely live on to “play” the survival game one more day.

A few years ago I read a shocking report on the state of poverty in South Africa. One story in this report, which still haunts me, was that of a single, jobless mother with a house full of hungry children. One day she couldn’t stand the never-ending struggle for survival any longer. She decided to buy poison to put an end to her family’s misery. But when she got to the shop to buy the poison, she couldn’t even afford that! She didn’t have enough money for poison. What a tragic irony! This poor woman couldn’t afford to live, but she could not afford to die either. What a sad world we live in. Many of the rich just keep on getting richer and getting more selfish by the day, while the poor just keep on getting poorer.

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Crucifixion was one of the Romans’ most shocking ways of maintaining law and order. It was mainly reserved for slaves who were guilty of serious offenses against Rome, such as insurrections and crime. Non-Romans who rebelled against Rome were often also executed in this inhumane way. In De Bello Judaico (5:449-551), the ancient Jewish author, Flavius Josephus describes how the Romans, during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD crucified about 500 Jews outside the city walls every day: “Out of rage and hatred for their captives Roman soldiers nailed these in different positions to crosses, in order to mock them. The number of these crosses were so many that there was not room for all the crosses, and also not enough crosses for all the bodies.”

Different ways of crucifixion were used by the Romans to make it as gruesome as possible. One of the philosophers said that the three worst forms of execution were being burnt alive, crucifixion, and the violent dislocation of body parts. Of these three, crucifixions were the worst. The Romans were especially fond of two kinds of crosses: a cross which was more or less T-shaped, with a cross beam attached to the top of the vertical pole, and the so-called crux immissa, a cross where the vertical pole protruded above the cross beam.

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