Years before Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ or Mel Gibson’s gory The Passion of the Christ there was, for me at least, the 6-hour Jesus of Nazareth miniseries. I admit, I don’t remember much of it, other than watching it during Holy Week to get a more intimate sense of what Jesus and his disciples went through in the days leading up to his death and resurrection.
Movies can illuminate our understanding of Jesus’ life. Yet, if they come too close to period-piece melodrama then we lose precisely the intimacy and immediacy of Jesus’ passion: Jesus suffered at the hands of a system of corruption and worldly power that rejected his message. Jesus also suffered in solidarity with those who are oppressed.
In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman teaches us that Jesus wasn’t so much in solidarity with the oppressed as he was himself a member of the oppressed classes, that Palestine was in a position of subservience to Rome, and that – to understand the pain and passion of the road to crucifixion – we must consider it through the eyes of those who hold no power and are easily victimized by the state or its deputies.
Movies can help tell the story, but sometimes Good Friday is better understood through a news story than through a costume drama, especially when powerful trod on the powerless in real time. Last month, a Salvadoran man living legally in Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was “mistakenly” deported and sent to a brutal Salvadoran prison. Our government has thus far shown no interest in remedying the mistake.
Two weeks ago, I was called to jury duty and spent several days in selection for a trial where I witnessed – for hours on end – the workings of a centuries-old system built and maintained to grant due process and to assume innocence until proven otherwise.
Which is to say that, in the eyes of our criminal justice system, Garcia is innocent of any crimes until proven otherwise, regardless of his own history.
This is the same axis on which the story of Good Friday turns: an innocent man is destroyed, and Pilate is unconcerned. The heartbreak is not just the loss of life: it is the pain of injustice, witnessing the plight of the powerless and the vulnerable, and confessing our own complicity in it.
That Good Friday gives way to a deeper story does not, for a minute, take way the grief and sadness of the day. Indeed, it represents God’s promise to be with us in grief, to move through our own broken hearts, and to bring into our world, through our tears, the spiritual energy to build a world that is just, compassionate, and loving.
Holy Week is beautiful, but it is difficult as well. We must approach it with our whole hearts, trusting that God will remake us as God remakes the whole world.
Faithfully,
The Very Rev. Bernard J. Owens