I was watching an old Medium re-run. They were in court and the prosecutor was asking his witness why he didn't come forward about his rapist teammate who had bragged about his victims in the locker room to the football team. He said there was enormous peer pressure; they may not have liked the guy, but he helped them win games. I shook my head, once again reminded of humanity's astonishing disappointment and heartbroken because on some level I'd become expectant of this kind of cruelty. It may have been shown on TV, but this was no fiction. It was true. People care more for victimizers than they do victims. I'd tried to imagine what not just he, but his entire team must have felt, told themselves to make them okay with this sickness. There are a million excuses I’ve heard over the course of TV shows, books, the news and what has come to be my personal favorite, as I inferred with this football team, was that to them, that boy's victims were strangers. Faceless, voiceless victims who could push aside and ignored, wistful, shapeless shadows to be blown away. Those girls weren't their sisters or girlfriends or friends, any kind status they felt gave them the obligation to choose justice over football games. They ignored his rape victims the way people Fe-breeze the stink of something they neglect to throw out.

For a split second, I wondered if that witness was a Christian. I wondered if he believed that Jesus died for him; that He was beaten, whipped and tortured for him, or if Jesus was just as faceless to him as those poor victims—and I was perplexed. What I was watching had nothing to do with Christianity, yet that's what came to me. Why? I'd thought about it for a while after the episode ended, and I realized that it mattered. That random thought I believed had nothing to do with it had everything to do with it, because it’s when Jesus becomes a faceless victim to us, we see other people that way too. Compassion becomes a choice, as if not helping someone, ignoring their pain, cavorting with rapists because they’re good quarterbacks is a viable option. It becomes where is no longer enough for people to be as they are. There is no longer a recognition of basic humanity. There now must be a reason to care for someone, the way people have qualifications for a job interview. We decide who is important and who is nobody, who will be remembered and who’s forgotten, who’s innocent and who had it coming, who’s pain actually matters and who should just ‘get over it’.

What does it take for someone to stop being faceless? When can someone convince themselves that someone is worth saving? Seeing their faces, hearing their voice or does it always boil down the bystander having his peace destroyed? When Jesus was tortured, ridiculed, spit upon, and killed it was all in front of a mass of people. The sky blackened and the earth shook; I even wonder if you could hear the angels weeping. And here He is still voiceless to so many to can’t hear Him begging his father to forgive us. Still He is faceless to so many to can’t see the blood and gaping wounds suffered in our place. Because no one would help Him and we still refuse to hear Him. Those boys were no better than the people who spit upon Jesus who in their cruelty and greed spit upon the victims of their rapist teammate. They left those girls to suffer at the hands of an evil man as those people stood by and viewed Jesus be nailed and watched His blood seep from his lifeless body.

It was only a TV show, but I felt its truth all too fully. Jesus knows what it is to be faceless, voiceless, to beg for help and receive none.