The Blogs: ‘The Cross Was Not Yet Heavy Enough’

‘The Cross Was Not Yet Heavy Enough’ by John Heartfield* 1933. An SA-oﬃcer screwing wooden boards to the ends of a cross carried by Jesus, creating an image of a swastika. (Creative Commons)

Christians mark Good Friday & Easter Sunday as important liturgical dates in their spiritual lives.

In Nazi history, Aryans tried to subvert those faith festival events. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership viewed Christianity with a mixture of pragmatism and contempt. In 1930’s Germany, the theological linkage between Jews and Christians was severely challenged by the Nazification of Europe.

A fake academic body was established by the Nazis. called the ‘Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life’. It had one sole aim: to create an ‘Aryan Jesus’ and promote their anti-Semitic ‘Bible’.

The German Evangelical Christian denomination (Deutsche Christen) shamefully became the principal advocates of this racially redefined Christianity. However, a minority of intentional Christians in Germany dissented from that warped dogma. Called, the ‘Confessional Church’ – its leaders fought to teach that Christ loves the Jewish people, as mentioned in the prophetic books of the Old Testament.(1)

Any antisemitic approach to Jews is unbiblical and in complete contradiction to what Jesus the Messiah taught:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile… If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” – Galatians 3: 27

Recently, opportunist Palestinians and their sectarian supporters have been trying to get a foothold in the churches, similar to the modus operandi of past Nazi ideologues.

The Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem December 2024 newsletter featured ‘Christ in the Rubble Nativity‘. Its ridiculous disproportionate doll was supposed to represent baby Jesus, inappropriately swaddled in cosplay keffiyeh.(2)

And to cap it all, that tendentious, aesthetically awful tableau was scattered with broken brick “debris” – supposed to metaphorically represent the Hamas / Israeli war. Some might ask – if the Christ child lies amid the rubble, who gets the blame? The Jews, of course!

That contentious crib attempted to subvert the hopeful Christmas message. At best, it could be seen as a misguided use of compassion. At worst, it casts ‘God with us—the incarnate babe, Jesus’ – as a “genocide victim” of Israel’s war on Hamas.

‘By suggesting that Jesus is a Palestinian (Jewish or not), activists are aligning him with a particularly revolutionary cause (Palestinian nationalism) and, as they see it, pitting him against a particular oppressor (Israel and Zionism)….’ (3)

Do Palestinian fascist activists get “inspiration” for such crass Christian appropriation from Europe’s antisemitic Aryan past? Is the Hamas-promoted ‘Palestinian Jesus‘ so very different from the Nazi-promoted ‘Aryan Jesus‘?

After all, both fascist movements attempt to align Christianity with a racial ideology, rejecting the Jewish roots of a biblical Christian faith. By portraying Jesus as Palestinian, Hamas and its apologists are able to construct a ‘theological’ basis for the new persecution of Jews. (3)

What will Palestinian cultural appropriators try next in their disrespect of Christian culture? Already there are keffiyeh-wrapped “Easter” egg memes on social media.

Perhaps Palestinian Marxists will not politicize the biblical meaning of Easter this time? After all, the Islamic doctrine of Easter is that Jesus did not die on the cross but was made to appear as if he did. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the gospel narrative: