April 11, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

(I’m pausing the series on disruptive church trends this week to focus on all that’s going on around us in light of the events of Holy Week and Easter. The series will resume next in next Thursday’s TAB.)

One week, the last week in Jesus’ life in the narrative of the gospels, takes us to dramatic, emotional highs and lows.

The Last Supper.

The disciples deserting Jesus when he most needed their support.

A betrayal. An arrest. A kangaroo court trial. Trumped-up charges. A political pardon.

Whoever said this stuff isn’t relevant? And we haven’t even gotten to Good Friday, much less Easter.

The immediate backdrop to this year’s Holy Week is the illegal deportation and detention to El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Taken from his home of 15 years in Maryland as the result of “an administrative error,” and still held there today with no efforts on the U.S. government’s part to win his release.

Not to mention the threat, picked up on a hot microphone, in a whisper of our president to the Salvadoran president, to start doing this to “homegrown criminals” in the future. Who will be “disappeared” next, to recover a word used in the 1970s and ‘80s of Argentina’s Dirty War?

You? Me? Someone we know? Someone we never thought it would happen to?

What does Jesus’ last week, and his death on a cross, mean for Garcia and the university students who have been illegally detained for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech on U.S. campuses?

Probably not, “Jesus died for our sins.” However much comfort you or I may draw from knowing we are forgiven, I believe Jesus’ suffering and death on a cross is how He identifies with people who are unjustly arrested, unfairly tried (if they are given a trial at all), imprisoned, and brutally executed, for the benefit of politicians and justified by the church.

And if this is what Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane and his death on Calvary mean, what does Easter’s resurrection mean?
Consider this: Jesus died for the people who put Him to death. Jesus rose for the people whose minds rejected the idea of a resurrection.

Even though our experience teaches us that death wins, and it only makes sense to continue to affirm what we already know: the Easter message is that death does not have the last word.

Death is real, but it is not final.

What does it mean for you, for me, for us to act as if that’s true?

See you in the streets.