Often, in the neighborhood I work in, you will see a tattoo of a tear on someone’s face, or sometimes several. In urban areas, tattoo tears can symbolize one of two things - that the owner has murdered somebody, or that they have lost someone close to them. These tears are many times translated to mean, “a mother’s son is dead.”
These tears represent death, telling a story told and retold through the myth of redemptive violence playing out in gang warfare. There are thousands and thousands of drug related deaths every year. These deaths are often considered justified by those who commit them, because they were wronged first.
Often, in paintings of Mary, the mother of Jesus, I have seen that there are tears on her face. Mary’s tears can be seen in pictures of her standing alone, holding the Christ-child, and holding his crucified body. You’ve seen the headlines about those scams where they set up a statue of Mary in a church to cry water, oil, and even blood. The tradition of displaying Mary with tears is an old one.
These tears represent death, telling the story of an innocent man senselessly murdered at the hands of those who didn’t understand what they were doing. This unjustified death happened once to put an end to death and injustice everywhere.
All of these tears for death, but where is a solution?
Christ entrusted himself to humanity in order to break this terrible cycle 2000 years before any of these were born. He showed the world what it was like to choose a death of shame and disgrace, rather than exercising his right to live. Instead of righteously paying the world back for everything it had unjustly done to him, he redeemed it by allowing its own sinful violence to complete his work and end the cycle.
Yet, this cycle of violence persists everywhere. A young man told me yesterday that during the first part of his life, his mother had a strange policy: He would only be in trouble for fighting if he lost. If he won, he was off the hook. I asked him what happened when he lost. “I dunno, ‘cuz I never lost. I knew I always needed to win.” A little while later, he informed me that he would definitely raise his kids the same way. My question is this: If everybody’s always trying to win, won’t everybody eventually lose? As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
[Don't let yourself get away with thinking that this "Welcome to the Jungle" kind of attitude only exists in the ghetto. Two words: Little League. You've seen the crazy parents. From a young age, their kids are taught not just to excel, but to win.]
What are we teaching children when we teach them to always come out on top? Is that we want to be most important? What if we took the idea of Kingdom ordering seriously (”The first shall be last”)? Would that apply to trying to get ahead?
Meanwhile, the new Marys, mothers of sons brutally murdered in a world that has yet to realize how free it is from the bondage of such warfare, wait for a day with no more tears.