Lent: Week Three

As we make our way towards the death of Jesus, and then afterwards to his resurrection, we reflect on his suffering as more than man's inhumanity to the Son of Man, but as God's suffering our oppression, and his identification with the oppressed. Jürgen Moltmann guides us to an understanding of the cross from the point of view of the downtrodden:

Why and in what way did the suffering, crucified God become the God of the poor and abandoned?

In Europe, Christmas and Easter are the high points of the church year, in custom and folklore and popular piety. This is not so in Latin America. The Christian 'feasts of life and hope' mean nothing to Indians and Mestizos. Their feast is Holy Week. The suffering and death of Jesus, the pain and mourning is something in which they can share. There they are at home. That is their life. The submission to fate and ability to suffer of the original inhabitants of Latin America has long been assisted by particular devotional forms. These include the stations of the cross, intercessory processions around representations of the fourteen biblical and legendary stations of Jesus during his passion.

Here, of course, the dominant church has from earliest times so formulated the texts of the stations of the cross that the believers are made aware only of the pains caused to Christ by their individual sins and their private immorality. But the poor no doubt recognized all their suffering in the crucified Christ: what they suffered from society and what they suffered from their fate.

Similarly, the piety of the Negro spirituals sung by black slaves in the southern states of the USA concentrates upon the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. For them his sufferings and death were a symbol of their own sufferings, their despised condition and their temptations in an unfriendly and inhuman world. They saw their fate in his sufferings. On the other hand, they could say that when Jesus was nailed to the cross and the Roman soldiers stabbed him in the side, he was not alone. The black slaves suffered with him and died with him.

"Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?" begins one of their songs. And the answer is: "We, the black slaves, were there with him in his agony." They knew the agony of rejection and the pain of hanging from a tree...Because black slaves knew the significance of the pain and shame of Jesus' death on the cross, they found themselves by his side.

By his suffering and death, Jesus identified himself with those who were enslaved, and took their pain upon himself. And if he was not alone in his suffering, nor were they abandoned in their pains of slavery. Jesus was with them. And there too lay their hope of freedom, by virtue of his resurrection into the freedom of God. Jesus was their identity with God in a world which had taken all hope from them and destroyed their human identity until it was unrecognizable.

"What a wonderful God we have--the source of every mercy and the one who so wonderfully comforts and strengthens us in our hardships and trials."

These words from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians take on greater meaning to me when I see them printed next to a painting of a young black girl, her face streaming with tears, her head turned upward in appeal, under the visible strain of generations of persecution, murder and slavery. Her image and these words hang on the wall in our house as an icon of the suffering Christ.


2 Corinthians continues after this verse to say "So that when others are troubled, needing our sympathy and encouragement, we can pass on to them this same help and comfort God has given us."

As Jesus has said, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."