On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night. His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee's for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving, and Lee's army was melting away. Just that morning a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant's mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.
'I have never been a big fan of hope. It’s a demanding emotion that insists on changing you. Hope pulls you out of yourself and into the world, forcing you to believe more is possible. Hate is a much less insistent master; it asks you only to loathe. It is quite happy to have you to itself and doesn’t ask you to go anywhere.'
'Growing up poor provided me with plenty of opportunities to wallow in that much less complex feeling. I hated drug dealers because I had addicts in my family. I knew they could afford Air Jordans, and I could not because my father visited the dealers on payday before he came home to us. When we wound up on government assistance, I detested the people I heard on talk radio who spoke about families like mine as the epitome of what was wrong with America. I abhorred the pastors I saw on television telling broke Black folks like me that a blessing was on the way if we just sent in $99.95. They treated faith like a spiritual lottery, and the chances of winning were about as likely as hitting the million-dollar jackpot. I was a person of few years and many resentments.'
'But it wasn’t just the ugly things that I rejected; I despised beautiful ones as well. At school when teachers tried to help us with inspirational speeches about the power of our minds and our potential to be more than athletes or criminals, we often mocked them. How dare they interrupt our despair with hope?'
'This tendency to reject beautiful things might explain why I have always felt sympathy for Judas. As a teenager, during Bible study class when other people spoke glowingly about mighty David or Moses, I pondered the tragedy of Judas. Known to history as the paradigmatic betrayer, Judas was the disciple who, for 30 pieces of silver, sold out Jesus by leading soldiers to where he was the night before he was crucified.'
'But what if Judas grew up on the rough-and-tumble side of Judea, where boots of Roman soldiers marching through his neighborhood filled him with rage and fear? What if he experienced the violent anti-Judaism the occupying force consistently inflicted upon his people? As a child of the South, from Northwest Huntsville, Ala., I know ways in which constant oppression can make pragmatism and self-preservation seem like the only realistic options.'
'For someone like Judas, Jesus offered the dangerous kind of hope that might have challenged him to relinquish his hostilities and reawaken that thing he had long since given up, the belief in the possibility that things might be different. That could explain why he agreed to betray Jesus. Betrayal was his chance to return to the safety and dependability of hopelessness.'
'Among the many times I rejected beauty in my teenage years, one day sticks out. My friends and I were sitting in a class with one of the instructors who didn’t transfer out of our district when things got hard and violence surged. That day we were in rare form, cracking more than the usual amount of jokes about her, interrupting her lecture. We also began a particularly intense game of trash can basketball with paper balls flying from all over the classroom. The more she tried to ignore us and continue, the more we wanted to break her.'
'After class, I saw her out in the hall, visibly troubled, steadying herself for the next group of kids. I remember walking away with my classmates, pretending to celebrate our victory — but a part of me knew that we had lost much more than we had gained. We had risked driving away someone whose only flaw was to care.'
'Isn’t it easier to believe that everyone who loves us has some secret agenda? That racism will forever block the creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community? That the gun lobby will always overwhelm every attempt at reform? That poverty is a fact of human existence? Despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest awhile.'
'The tragedy of Judas’s story is that his despair never let him go. The gospel accounts tell us that after betraying Jesus, he killed himself. I do not know many people who have committed suicide, but lots of people from my neighborhood quit on life. Convinced by our shared traumas that their story was over, they let drugs or the streets take them. I have never thought of myself as better than them. I simply was lucky that the vices I turned to in my wandering years did not ruin me.'
'In the gospel stories, Jesus overflows with forgiveness. On the cross, one of the last things he said was a plea that God forgive those who crucified him. After the resurrection, he forgives Peter and the other disciples.'
'His generosity has been a great cheer to all of us misfits who have faltered in our time of testing. The only better story of redemption I can imagine would have been the reconciliation of Judas the Betrayer and Jesus. I am confident Jesus would have forgiven Judas. But in the narrative Judas dies before Jesus rises from the dead. If only Judas had lived a little longer to find that the beautiful thing he tried to destroy was not so easily vanquished.'
'That indestructibility of hope might be the central and most radical claim of Easter — that three days after Jesus was killed, he returned to his disciples physically and that made all the difference. Easter, then, is a not metaphor for new beginnings; it is about encountering the person who, despite every disappointment we experience with ourselves and with the world, gives us a reason to carry on.'
'So this Easter I will make my way with my family to the South Side of Chicago, to that congregation that serves as our church home. I will do my best to join in the songs of celebration, not because I no longer feel the darkness that has marked so much of my journey, but because sometimes I still do.' (NYTimes, OPINION by Esau McCaulley.
'He is a contributing Opinion writer and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. He is theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation in Chicago and author of the forthcoming memoir “How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.”
As a Civil War nerd, I sincerely appreciate your distillation of 4 years of war and death and devastation into the critical difference between the two sides - people who worked for themselves vs. people who owned people to work for them. Thank you.
It’s ironic but historically southern white folk still revere Lee and hate Grant. I spent many years in Virginia politics and served as the most liberal member of the Virginia legislature and there is no doubt that those imaginary allegiances are still observed. What we see today in Tennessee probably would not happen in Virginia but certainly overt racism is part of the Republican playbook everywhere in the South as their strategists know how to get their votes. It is all coming to a major showdown and Biden will act forcefully as he should but add this dichotomy to abortion, assault weapons and fair elections as the critical issues to save our democracy in November 24! It’s all on the line then folks so open your checkbook, register GenZ nonpartisan with Harvard students’ help at www.turnup.us and volunteer to turn out the biggest vote in America’s history! No going back! No sitting still! No complacency! It’s on US to get it done!
Consider the contrast between how Lincoln, Grant, and the North in general treated the South and how vanquished traitors in other countries have been treated throughout history. Rather than acknowledge their great fortune at not being the target of wholesale retribution, the South continued (and continues to this day) to do whatever it could to sabotage the American experiment.
Thanks Professor. Just what we needed to end this week, a great history lesson to remind us that every tomorrow we get up and get to work. Happy Easter to all.
I truly do believe we will win this battle, I really do. Getting up every morning, putting on my old sweat pants and telling myself that today is a new day in which to excel! We can do this! Onward!
We hard working common folk need to take a day off from work and get rid of the lying politicians who steal from us, send our kids to war (George W. Bush), make profits off of killing our kids, deny us our votes, force women into unwanted or unhealthy pregnancies, and spread hate and their hypocritical values. Now!
Echoes have rippled through time and land on this era’s shores. Clearly it was more than 25,000 mouths to feed but all those of the heirs of the Confederate ancestors who are now mostly poor and still hungry. This is timely, and The Democrats and Biden Administration should be planning provisions for The Southerners and them of theirs flung abroad in red rivulets (Idaho, pockets of California), Wyoming etc.... because it is their soul hunger, the hungry ghosts of hate built on fear that needs to be sated lest they swell into the new state militias in the works....
Thanks for this trip back to another April, in another time, where there was similar conflict. I'm also glad you took an early evening two nights in a row.
Happy Easter! Thanks for the reminder of where we been, and where we seem to be heading. I take a bit of hope that our country has been divided before & the union held. May we all remember the important lessons we have learned so painfully & find a common humanity that we can begin to heal the rifts.
Thank you for sharing the reality of war. All the death, dying and destruction and still the South needed the North to feed their hungry soldiers. And they did without question. Some states are still in the mental state of battle. Blue and Red. Democrats and republicans. Justice and injustice. Ask the people in Tennessee if they approve of the Tennessee Three, Democrats, voted in by the people, two Black men, expelled and a third a white Woman, not expelled, by House vote, missing expulsion by one vote. Protesting for pro-gun control reform on the House floor, after six people including three children were murdered in a school shooting at a Christian School in Nashville. Vice President Harris made a surprise trip to Nashville and said, “it wasn’t about these three leaders- it was about what they were representing, …It’s about whose voices they were channeling. Is that not what a Democracy allows?” And wasn’t it also about racism and skin color? Still fighting the Civil War.
Inspiring and revealing history. Thank you.
On another note, I write from Vancouver, BC. It’s where people and cultures from around world exist in peace and are celebrated.
It’s halftime at a soccer match and Indian women are dancing on the field to recognize Vaisakhi, the start of Spring. Everyone is cheering.
If only the confederates would consider surrendering again to cure our collective headache.
'I have never been a big fan of hope. It’s a demanding emotion that insists on changing you. Hope pulls you out of yourself and into the world, forcing you to believe more is possible. Hate is a much less insistent master; it asks you only to loathe. It is quite happy to have you to itself and doesn’t ask you to go anywhere.'
'Growing up poor provided me with plenty of opportunities to wallow in that much less complex feeling. I hated drug dealers because I had addicts in my family. I knew they could afford Air Jordans, and I could not because my father visited the dealers on payday before he came home to us. When we wound up on government assistance, I detested the people I heard on talk radio who spoke about families like mine as the epitome of what was wrong with America. I abhorred the pastors I saw on television telling broke Black folks like me that a blessing was on the way if we just sent in $99.95. They treated faith like a spiritual lottery, and the chances of winning were about as likely as hitting the million-dollar jackpot. I was a person of few years and many resentments.'
'But it wasn’t just the ugly things that I rejected; I despised beautiful ones as well. At school when teachers tried to help us with inspirational speeches about the power of our minds and our potential to be more than athletes or criminals, we often mocked them. How dare they interrupt our despair with hope?'
'This tendency to reject beautiful things might explain why I have always felt sympathy for Judas. As a teenager, during Bible study class when other people spoke glowingly about mighty David or Moses, I pondered the tragedy of Judas. Known to history as the paradigmatic betrayer, Judas was the disciple who, for 30 pieces of silver, sold out Jesus by leading soldiers to where he was the night before he was crucified.'
'But what if Judas grew up on the rough-and-tumble side of Judea, where boots of Roman soldiers marching through his neighborhood filled him with rage and fear? What if he experienced the violent anti-Judaism the occupying force consistently inflicted upon his people? As a child of the South, from Northwest Huntsville, Ala., I know ways in which constant oppression can make pragmatism and self-preservation seem like the only realistic options.'
'For someone like Judas, Jesus offered the dangerous kind of hope that might have challenged him to relinquish his hostilities and reawaken that thing he had long since given up, the belief in the possibility that things might be different. That could explain why he agreed to betray Jesus. Betrayal was his chance to return to the safety and dependability of hopelessness.'
'Among the many times I rejected beauty in my teenage years, one day sticks out. My friends and I were sitting in a class with one of the instructors who didn’t transfer out of our district when things got hard and violence surged. That day we were in rare form, cracking more than the usual amount of jokes about her, interrupting her lecture. We also began a particularly intense game of trash can basketball with paper balls flying from all over the classroom. The more she tried to ignore us and continue, the more we wanted to break her.'
'After class, I saw her out in the hall, visibly troubled, steadying herself for the next group of kids. I remember walking away with my classmates, pretending to celebrate our victory — but a part of me knew that we had lost much more than we had gained. We had risked driving away someone whose only flaw was to care.'
'Isn’t it easier to believe that everyone who loves us has some secret agenda? That racism will forever block the creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community? That the gun lobby will always overwhelm every attempt at reform? That poverty is a fact of human existence? Despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest awhile.'
'The tragedy of Judas’s story is that his despair never let him go. The gospel accounts tell us that after betraying Jesus, he killed himself. I do not know many people who have committed suicide, but lots of people from my neighborhood quit on life. Convinced by our shared traumas that their story was over, they let drugs or the streets take them. I have never thought of myself as better than them. I simply was lucky that the vices I turned to in my wandering years did not ruin me.'
'In the gospel stories, Jesus overflows with forgiveness. On the cross, one of the last things he said was a plea that God forgive those who crucified him. After the resurrection, he forgives Peter and the other disciples.'
'His generosity has been a great cheer to all of us misfits who have faltered in our time of testing. The only better story of redemption I can imagine would have been the reconciliation of Judas the Betrayer and Jesus. I am confident Jesus would have forgiven Judas. But in the narrative Judas dies before Jesus rises from the dead. If only Judas had lived a little longer to find that the beautiful thing he tried to destroy was not so easily vanquished.'
'That indestructibility of hope might be the central and most radical claim of Easter — that three days after Jesus was killed, he returned to his disciples physically and that made all the difference. Easter, then, is a not metaphor for new beginnings; it is about encountering the person who, despite every disappointment we experience with ourselves and with the world, gives us a reason to carry on.'
'So this Easter I will make my way with my family to the South Side of Chicago, to that congregation that serves as our church home. I will do my best to join in the songs of celebration, not because I no longer feel the darkness that has marked so much of my journey, but because sometimes I still do.' (NYTimes, OPINION by Esau McCaulley.
'He is a contributing Opinion writer and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. He is theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation in Chicago and author of the forthcoming memoir “How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.”
As a Civil War nerd, I sincerely appreciate your distillation of 4 years of war and death and devastation into the critical difference between the two sides - people who worked for themselves vs. people who owned people to work for them. Thank you.
It’s ironic but historically southern white folk still revere Lee and hate Grant. I spent many years in Virginia politics and served as the most liberal member of the Virginia legislature and there is no doubt that those imaginary allegiances are still observed. What we see today in Tennessee probably would not happen in Virginia but certainly overt racism is part of the Republican playbook everywhere in the South as their strategists know how to get their votes. It is all coming to a major showdown and Biden will act forcefully as he should but add this dichotomy to abortion, assault weapons and fair elections as the critical issues to save our democracy in November 24! It’s all on the line then folks so open your checkbook, register GenZ nonpartisan with Harvard students’ help at www.turnup.us and volunteer to turn out the biggest vote in America’s history! No going back! No sitting still! No complacency! It’s on US to get it done!
Consider the contrast between how Lincoln, Grant, and the North in general treated the South and how vanquished traitors in other countries have been treated throughout history. Rather than acknowledge their great fortune at not being the target of wholesale retribution, the South continued (and continues to this day) to do whatever it could to sabotage the American experiment.
Thanks Professor. Just what we needed to end this week, a great history lesson to remind us that every tomorrow we get up and get to work. Happy Easter to all.
I truly do believe we will win this battle, I really do. Getting up every morning, putting on my old sweat pants and telling myself that today is a new day in which to excel! We can do this! Onward!
We hard working common folk need to take a day off from work and get rid of the lying politicians who steal from us, send our kids to war (George W. Bush), make profits off of killing our kids, deny us our votes, force women into unwanted or unhealthy pregnancies, and spread hate and their hypocritical values. Now!
Not much has changed. The Confederates are still bragging about how much better they are than the rest of us while picking our pockets.
And they still like to wear flashy uniforms.
What a great history lesson. Thank you!
Echoes have rippled through time and land on this era’s shores. Clearly it was more than 25,000 mouths to feed but all those of the heirs of the Confederate ancestors who are now mostly poor and still hungry. This is timely, and The Democrats and Biden Administration should be planning provisions for The Southerners and them of theirs flung abroad in red rivulets (Idaho, pockets of California), Wyoming etc.... because it is their soul hunger, the hungry ghosts of hate built on fear that needs to be sated lest they swell into the new state militias in the works....
Thanks for this trip back to another April, in another time, where there was similar conflict. I'm also glad you took an early evening two nights in a row.
Happy Easter! Thanks for the reminder of where we been, and where we seem to be heading. I take a bit of hope that our country has been divided before & the union held. May we all remember the important lessons we have learned so painfully & find a common humanity that we can begin to heal the rifts.
Thank you for sharing the reality of war. All the death, dying and destruction and still the South needed the North to feed their hungry soldiers. And they did without question. Some states are still in the mental state of battle. Blue and Red. Democrats and republicans. Justice and injustice. Ask the people in Tennessee if they approve of the Tennessee Three, Democrats, voted in by the people, two Black men, expelled and a third a white Woman, not expelled, by House vote, missing expulsion by one vote. Protesting for pro-gun control reform on the House floor, after six people including three children were murdered in a school shooting at a Christian School in Nashville. Vice President Harris made a surprise trip to Nashville and said, “it wasn’t about these three leaders- it was about what they were representing, …It’s about whose voices they were channeling. Is that not what a Democracy allows?” And wasn’t it also about racism and skin color? Still fighting the Civil War.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/07/tennessee-house-expulsion-kamala-harris-meet-ousted-members/11621736002/
Thank you for this study in contrast
and being generous in victory!