Sometimes it helps to see parallels between the passion narratives and our daily experience where we find many kinds of Eucharist. At the grocery store recently, choosing the wrong check-out line as always, I wound up behind a customer who engaged the clerk in a lengthy discussion of measles. Every symptom from childhood on was discussed at great length. By the time we hit “my sister at age 5,” I glanced at the guy behind me.
Big, young and sweetly shy, he had a beautiful assortment of flowers in his grocery cart, which I complimented. “Odd assortment of groceries, huh?” he responded. Along with the flowers were many small packets of jello and rice pudding. “I work at a nursing home,” he explained. “We’ll put a flower on each lunch tray.” “And jello will be a treat!” I finished. As the conversation ahead turned to dog diseases, I was grinning at “a cart full of jello and joy.”
Like Eucharist, Christ’s Good Friday continues in the suffering of the Mystical Body. The pain inflicted on Jesus gives us a framework to hold the current cruelty of the U.S. government. When Trump and Musk ended the U.S. Agency for International Development, probably illegally, reporter Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times traveled through East Africa and reported on the devastating, preventable deaths that have already resulted. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html?campaign_id=45&emc=edit_nk_20250317&instance_id=150222&nl=nicholas-kristof®i_id=73769963&segment_id=193680&user_id=2a4e71af79d7b498d29e2d0c1faa1e7d)
Kristof’s clear, dramatic diagrams show the heartbreaking numbers who will die without the medicine and health workers the U.S. once funded. And how much money will the billionaire’s cuts save, presumably for his rich cronies? “The cost of first-line H.I.V. medications to keep a person alive is less than 12 cents a day.” Joseph was betrayed by his brothers for 20 pieces of silver and Jesus by Judas for 30…
No logic can explain it. No words can wrap around the bottomless grief of a mother losing her child in S. Sudan, or Mary’s at the crucifixion. The eyes of faith can turn only to the broken bones and bloodied hands of One who suffers in innocent orphans and desperately ill, malnourished people. He is with us in our worst brokenness. Thomas Merton once wrote about his younger brother’s death in war: “and in the wreckage of your April, Christ lies slain.”
Questions are unanswerable, but One goes before us who shares the agony. And those with a conscience, those who celebrate Holy Week must answer Kristof’s challenge (3/19): “pulling back aid… largely silent about the world’s worst humanitarian crisis… comes painfully close to complicity.”
Kathy Coffey 