Two Thousand Years Apart

Thank you to the friend who pointed out to me that this year Maundy Thursday fell on March 24, the 36th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Romero spoke out against poverty, social injustice, assassinations and torture.It is believed that those who organized his assassination were members of Salvadoran death squads. Funding for the squads came primarily from right-wing Salvadoran businessmen and landowners.

On the following day, the Christian church was marking Good Friday, approximately 2000 years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. He spoke out against poverty and social injustice, giving a voice to the voiceless and a place to the displaced. He was crucified by the Romans, the ruling power in Israel at that time.

[Scholars have provided estimates for the year of crucifixion in the range 30–33 AD, with the majority of modern scholars favouring the date April 7, 30 AD. Another popular date is Friday, April 3, 33 AD. Wikipedia]

It was what Archbishop

Romero did and said that got him assassinated .

Likewise it was what Jesus did and said that brought him to the attention of the Roman authorities and to death by crucifixion.

When you look at the events in this way, it is impossible not to see the correlation. Both men were killed by those in their time and place who had something to lose by the empowerment of the less fortunate, that something being wealth and power.

Throughout the course of history, there have been countless other examples of the same thing happening. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. come readily to mind. Any time the statue quo is threatened, the establishment lashes out at those who are doing the threatening.

What is the most important: where and how those lives ended, or the actions that got them to that place?

I would like to think that the end results show not only the paranoia of those perpetuating the crimes but also their insatiable greed and inability to deal honestly with any challenge, that they do not in any way illustrate or exemplify how or what these men lived for. Is this really what we want to dwell on?

What would Good Friday look like if we, in fact, took the time that day to look at those things that Jesus did with his life that were instrumental in his ending up on the cross all those centuries ago? And then taking it one step farther, we looked at our own time and our own lives, to see what we should be doing in the here and now to further those values that we profess to espouse as Christians? As Peter Rollins asks in his short story ‘No Conviction’ from his book ‘The Orthodox Heretic; and other impossible tales’: Would there be enough evidence for a judge to convict us of living as Christ and his followers did, of challenging the system and becoming a thorn in their side, of dying to ourselves?’

This is something for us to ponder as we reflect on the experiences of Easter 2016. Perhaps we need to all ask ourselves if we would be convicted as others have been over the past millenniums of living a life that challenges the power brokers in our society. Are we really ready to pay the cost of living out that which we profess as both Romero and Jesus were?

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