Today’s Invitation
Today we invite you to explore the Passion’s parallels to our current time of deportation and fascism; engage our shared exhaustion and our solidarity with one another as we search for God in this time; and embody the ‘dark night of the soul’ in which we live with a contemplation, and the organizing of Democratic Socialists of America.
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Exploring the Passions Parallels
We bring our embeddedness in the present into our encounter with a Gospel text that narrates a moment of persecution that seems to transcend history itself. As the disciples lay dazed at Jesus’s feet, the crowd, with Judas at their head, approached with torches and swords. Intent on heightening Judas’s duplicity, the narrative has him coming forward to “betray the Chosen One with a kiss.” When ICE came to arrest Mahmoud Khalil for speaking out against the Genocide in Gaza, there was not the pretense of a kiss, but instead a threat to his pregnant wife, Noor Abdalla. The thing that brings Khalil and Jesus together across millennia is their self-possession while being arrested. Maintaining dignified equanimity defies the desires of the imperial state to terrify and humiliate its targets. It is also a way to protect those around you from becoming targets. Jesus deescalates the violence between his followers and the mob by healing the severed ear of the high priest’s attendant. The ears of the ICE agents remain clogged as Noor tries to get them to speak to Mahmoud’s attorney, to identify themselves.
Criminalizing dissenters in 2025 reveals how the liturgical reading of the Passion is a political act. Imperial authorities executed Jesus “together with the criminals” at the place of the Skull. Earlier, Jesus explains to his companions at the Last Supper that they ought to carry swords, since they would be classed together with criminals. New Testament scholar François Bovon writes that “Luke’s God needs human beings; he has no hands but theirs…Since they are of flesh and blood, they need bags for their journeys, food for their meals, and even swords to repel the brigands” (182). Bovon sees the necessity of the swords for fighting off thieves; Jesus’s words suggest that to be caught carrying swords would make the disciples appear to be criminals themselves, which he judges as appropriate for the “suffering servant.” To serve God, the truth, means being mistaken for a criminal even as one is the target of lawless oppression.
Conservatives will say that it is idolatrous to conflate the drama of the Passion with the thousand moments of exploitation and violence that punctuate our everyday life. It is Jesus who is betrayed, not the earth, not the undocumented, not the worker. A traditional progressive response would be to point to Matthew 25, “the least of these,” and to assert that God is present among (or incarnate in) those who suffer unjustly in prisons and on the street. This very well may be so. But for me, the Passion represents a moment when this tired complaint against liberative Christianity falls flat. This is because the legion of moral and political failures that we can pack into the archetypal Passion story does not require us to equate the wretched of the earth with God. The entire point is that this is the annual liturgical recurrence of God’s absence from the earth. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is the time to notice that there is no divine hand on the steering wheel of history.
The point of a liberative Christian reading of the Passion is not that we seek the perverse literalization and promiscuity of the Incarnation by confusing the Gospel of Christ with “Social Justice.” This orthodox heresy is called for in other liturgical seasons. No, the point here is that if the Son of God and his chosen companions can be so vulnerable, so weak, so divided among themselves, so able to be snatched up by the ICE of their day, then small wonder the very slightest thread of human solidarity is so frayed in the current moment.
This is the moment to feel the immensity of our abandonment, to pay attention to the darkness gathering around us, a moment when Jesus can address the “Daughters of Jerusalem,” and command them not to weep for him but instead: “Weep rather for yourselves and for your children! The time is coming when it will be said: ‘Blessed are the childless, the wombs that have never given birth and the breasts that have never nursed.’ Then people will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us up!’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” There is an important lesson in this – even in the darkest depths of the Passion, Jesus can speak to darker days coming. The natalist-fascist Christians must avert their eyes here, so coarsely does Jesus brush aside their hopes for salvation through the patriarchal domination of wombs. And the wood has become very dry indeed across California and Quebec and New York as capital and the state invest in the extractive war machine instead of decarbonizing. The Passion can be the focal point of negativity in the Christian liturgical year, “the triumph of darkness,” but it never bottles up and contains all of the gloom.
Commentary by Klaus Yoder
A Contemplative Exercise
From Enfleshed:
“We will not look to the cross for what saves us. Let us refuse to glorify empire’s violence or try to blunt its terror. Surely, the stomach of god turns at every prayer casting this tragedy in their name. This is a day for bearing witness to all the lives and life destroyed through theologies of dominance, institutional sacrifices, imperial and colonizing forces, and stories that sabotage from the inside out. Lands and peoples, spirits and futures, creatures and communities. Blessed is this flesh of god. We remember. We weep. We remain followers of defiant love.”
What are the moments you feel most weighed down with exhaustion? Do you see these moments as originating from inside the particular spiritual circumstances of your life, or do they connect to the political and economic conditions of this moment?
How does the liturgical season of Lent contain and represent evil? Is this ritualization of cruelty, suffering, and loss supposed to be a way of mechanically controlling negativity in our lives, or does it provide an opportunity for something more complex?
The people I wish to draw attention to now are those fighting like hell in a time when it would be easy to weighted down with the sleep of despair, complacency, and numbness. Being a socialist in New York, I want to hold up my comrades in the Mid-Hudson Valley, Capital District, Lower Hudson Valley, and New York City chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America as we fight for a free Palestine, the empowerment of workers, housing justice, queer liberation, and a just transition from carbon capitalism. Political radicalism takes a kind of religiosity that offers a vision of a better world and forms of community that can persevere in the face of adverse conditions.
A piece of art that connects to the themes I have tried to work through is First Reformed, the 2017 film by Paul Schrader starring Ethan Hawke as the troubled Reverend Toller. The film takes place in a rustbelt city in Upstate New York. Toller is an alcoholic, traumatized by the death of his son, and struggling to find a spiritual connection to God as he pastors First Reformed, a historical church that serves as a historical-tourism appendage to a much larger megachurch.
The few who seek out his ministry include a couple of radical environmentalists, one of whom, Michael, is on the point of despair about the prospect of his partner, Mary, giving birth to a child in a world that is racing toward climate catastrophe. This encounter gives Toller a new way to make sense of his own malaise and the overwhelming sense of despair he feels. As he writes in his journal, becomes radicalized, and falls in love with Mary, Toller appears to be groping for some connection with God as he fantasizes about becoming a terrifying avenger for divine and climate justice. Toller’s boss from the megachurch complains that Toller is “always in the Garden [of Gethsemane],” too preoccupied with existential questions to function as an effective pastor. I chose this film to accompany my reflections on the Passion because of this anchoring image of a person who cannot exit the dark night of his soul because the sun itself seems draped with sackcloth (Rev. 6.12).