For whatever reason, after flipping through a couple of non-starters (the Exodus and Hosea included), I landed in the Passion section of Matthew. I am leaving Suchitoto this afternoon to spend the evening and night at the Universidad Centroamericana for the vigil commemorating the massacre of six Jesuits and two of their colleagues. There is much to be said just about this particular event in history. I will leave this to your own research, only to say that they were massacred by the Salvadoran military – by US-trained officers – on the night of November 15/16, 1989, on the grounds of the University where they lived. Brutal doesn't even begin to describe the manner of their assassination. Because they were in many ways the intellectual core of the church-based liberation and peace movements, the soldiers removed their brains and strew them across the garden outside their dormitories. It is this level of violence that we commemorate tonight – and to which we say “never again,” though we know that that is an unachievable reality. In any case, we recommit ourselves to the struggle that this might one day be true.
I don't know that I've ever read any of the Passion narratives outside of Holy Week before, so doing so in the fall, a good six months away from last Easter and this, seemed appropriate. It wasn't until I actually got into the thing that I started to realize just how appropriate it was for this day – this time in which we are celebrating the lives of massacred people all over the country, with Día de los Difuntos, the Copapayo massacre, and now the Jesuits. There are plenty of possible parallels to draw between the two stories, but more than anything, several new things just jumped to my eye.
Matthew 26:40 – Since our last spirituality night, we've been talking recently about all of the different ways that a seemingly small comment or gesture can be a profound word of “I love you.” Even while we were at Peggy's discussing this last Sunday, Alex's campo brother called him to check on how he was doing and to make sure he was going to be able to catch the bus home. When Alex sat back down from the call, Peggy very gently interjected, “That was Chomingo saying I love you.”
I read Jesus' words in this verse as an I love you. So much is lost when you only have text, so I'd always read and heard these words as a rebuke before. But think about it. “Can you not keep watch with me for one hour?” Jesus might have a better idea than the others how precarious things will be after his death, and the fact that they wipe out quickly – certainly understandable given what seems to have been an intense period in their ministry together! - is not promising. It is out of concern, not anger, that I hear Jesus underlining that (more or less) “you have to be able to do this.” “I love you.” I love you and I'm about to be not here in the same way that you are used to me being here and it scares me to think that you aren't ready. And I love you. [I feel I should follow this by saying that it does really freak me out to put words into the mouths of biblical characters. But here I am, doing it anyway.]
26:50 – Only ten verses later. Judas kisses Jesus and Jesus says to him, “Do what you came for, friend.” FRIEND. He just coined the phrase “the kiss of death” and Jesus calls him friend. There is, as I see it, a profound understanding there of Judas's helplessness in all of it. I think about the kids here who end up in gangs because...they have no other options. Because they are threatened (or more likely their families are) and so they have to join. Or because a person has to eat and unemployment hovers around 70% here. Or because they simply live in an area that already belongs to a particular gang and in order to be protected in their own neighborhood, they must belong.
I think about the sixteen kids (all but one between 18 and 22 – aka, between Ella's and my ages) burned to death in the fire that raged through the juvenile prison this week, and the 22 more in hospitals, many with burns so bad that they will definitely die as well. They were all put there under the new anti-gang law passed this summer. The gangs here do terrible things, usually to people who have done nothing to call their attention. Not that one can ever earn the violence that is rained down by the gangs. But the kids in that prison – so many of the people in El Salvador's crowded-three-times-past-capacity prisons – were not the folks calling the shots. All too often, those are the same people who own the private security firms, whose pockets thicken when ordinary people feel so much fear that they hire guards.
I think about those guys and the fact that they were in prison, like so many of their (my) brothers and sisters around the world, because of actions that they had only a small part in actually taking on. And I hear Jesus call them “friend.” Clothed in tattoos in a country where that only means one thing, to the extent that my “pollito” (little chicken – it's actually a hummingbird) tattoo catches attention and interest from all sides, I hear an understanding in Jesus's voice that rejects completely what they have done, but sees the utter lack of choice (or at least seeming lack, which is just as crushing) that these guys faced, embraces them, returns a kiss of death with a kiss of life and peace, and says “I love you.”
So this week we celebrate the Jesuits. We will say the presente after the names of Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Celina Ramos, Elba Ramos, Ignacio Martín Baró, Amando López, Joaquín López y López, and Juan Ramon Moreno. We will also say, maybe silently, presente in the names of Antonio Cartagena, Juan Carlos Romero, Gerardo Enrique Alvarado, and the rest of the young men who died in the fire. We will celebrate the lives and grieve the deaths of children of God put to death by violence and poverty. And we will offer our small but resolute nunca mas.
No comments:
Post a Comment