This is a song about someone who's realized inheritance isn't about choosing your family, it's about being unable to choose anything else. She's convinced the gallows are genetic, that the trap she's in was built into her body before she could say no to it.
These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be
The crosses mark a person she was, not who she is now, but they're written on her skin permanently. Past tense here is doing work—she's claiming transformation while wearing physical proof she hasn't escaped anything.
Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother's blood
She's rewriting the entire gospel to make Christ's obedience look like freedom compared to biological inheritance. The theology is backwards—Christ famously accepts the father's will—but she needs him to reject it so her own inability to leave looks like cosmic law instead of choice.
He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / But he'll never escape what he's made up of
The switch to 'he' makes this about Christ until you realize it's about her father, or maybe both. She's describing inherited violence as something you try to scrub away but can't, which means she thinks the harm being done to her is just him acting out what his own blood forced him to do.
Swinging by my neck from the family tree / He'll laugh and say, 'You know I raised you better than this'
The father is mocking her while she hangs, turning her death into a failure to meet his standards. She's not saying he's killing her—she's saying the fates did it and he's just disappointed in how she's handling execution, which is maybe the most ruthless bit of blame-deflection in her whole catalog.
Anhedönia has said Ethel is what happens if you don't break the cycle, and this song is the moment that decision calcifies into biology. She's not saying her family hurt her. She's saying they couldn't help it because blood made them do it, and now blood is making her do it too, which means nobody's responsible and nothing can change. That's not fatalism. That's permission.