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When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, ‘You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.’ (Matthew 26:1-2)
Holy Week can’t come soon enough. I long to see beauty, and I hunger
for the ugliness of our times to be exposed for what it is … because I’m angry …
and disgusted … and sad.
I ache for love’s splendor to release a cascade of tears and wash the
squalor of our times … and of our present government … from my heart, for it overwhelms
my senses.
There appears to be no low beneath which our current administration
will not go. Virtually anything can be justified in the MAGA hive-mind, blatant
injustice, callous cruelty, sadistic posturing. It’s the daily diet of the evening
news.
It should shock the conscience of all people of good will—and especially
of Christians, as we contemplate the image of Jesus being handed over to those
who conspire to callously kill him. The resonance between Jesus’ last days … and
our days … seems too obvious to miss, although, sadly, many will.
The evening news exposes the spectacle of masked agents swarming
from unmarked vans to surround international students and hard-working
immigrants and God-knows who else. Refusing to show credentials or warrants,
they seize their phones, identification documents and sweep them away to detention
centers a thousand miles distant, to be stripped of their clothing and dignity,
denied access to families, counsel, hearings or trials.
The sadistic depravity of our present administration descended to
a new and absurdist depth when the meticulously-coifed Secretary of Homeland
Security, wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, stood in front of dozens of prisoners,
stacked in a multi-tiered Salvadoran prison, talking tough about what happens to
the undocumented who commit crimes on American streets.
She used human beings as a prop for her get-tough posturing, quite
against the Geneva Convention, but what does that matter to an administration where
the value of human dignity is as expendable as the people rounded up just for
saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Nor does it matter when ICE agents get the wrong person, a citizen
or someone with protected status, and hands them over to that brutal Salvadoran
prison. They, too are expendable, denounced as criminals by an administration with
a deplorable disregard for facts.
Even when an ‘administrative error’ is acknowledged, the President’s
press secretary, who sometimes stands before the White House briefing room wearing
a cross around her neck, justifies the imprisonment of an innocent man and indicates
the administration will make no effort, not even a phone call to Salvadoran authorities,
to seek his release and return him to his family.
His innocence doesn’t matter. He’s been handed over and needs to
stay that way for the good of the country, which was exactly the logic of the authorities
who rounded Jesus up and pinned him to a cross.
The cross of Christ is the measure of all things, the light that
reveals and clarifies the truth of our lives and the meaning of our times. It exposes
human callousness and cruelty for what it is, the sadistic denial of justice, a
resolute defiance toward the sanctity of human life and dignity, created in God’s
image.
But it does so much more than expose the ugliness of human beings
and nations. It also holds the image of Jesus before our hearts as he is handed
over—surrendering himself in love to the will of the One who is Love, refusing
to hate, forgiving his enemies, caring for his mother, blessing a dying man at
his side with the promise of paradise.
Bearing every ugliness the world can inflict upon him, the beauty
of God, who is Love Unbounded, shines from him on Calvary’s dark mountain to
raise from death the love he is within us.
Look there. Behold his beauty. The darkness of our times will not
overtake you.
