Empty tomb, absent Christ, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Painting by Salvadoran folks artist, Fernand Llort

As I worked on my Easter sermon this week, two oligarchs who rule through repression and fear sat for a press conference in the White House. As anticipated, a journalist questioned the men, Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran native and US permanent resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador and imprisoned in the country’s notorious torture facility, CECOT.

I shouldn’t have watched. The depravity of the men overwhelmed me, not only their lies about Abrego Garcia’s connections to gangs, but their delight – their utter delight – in their power to destroy ordinary people’s lives.

I found it difficult to concentrate for days after the presser. I had trouble sleeping, getting my work done. I’ve lived in countries where activists and ordinary people are regularly disappeared. Now I am citizen of one of these countries. And in the midst of that, I needed to write a sermon about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the good news of life conquering death.

I am fortunate that the gospel accompanying me through Easter sermon preparation is Luke, a gospel that puts at the center the women disciples. These women are with Jesus as he walks to Golgotha, weeping and beating their breasts. They watch him tortured and nailed to a cross. They stand near by and watch him die. They walk with his body to the tomb. Since the men disciples have fled, deserting Jesus at his arrest, we can guess that the report we receive from Luke is the eyewitness account of these women – “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them.”

In preparation for Easter, I read one of Herbert McCabe’s sermons, dedicated to Archbishop Oscar Romero, on the Lukan resurrection account.¹ In it McCabe recalls the story of Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto, who helped develop the base community model and was imprisoned under Brazil’s dictatorship for four years. During that time Beto recalled that one of his interrogators asked him a question. “How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?” Betto answered: “For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims.”

For Beto, the question at the heart of the gosel is not religious agreement but shared suffering. A resurrected people enter into life with those suffer:

His belief is that God so loved the world that he sent his son, not to set the world to rights but to be one of us; not to rule the world but to suffer at the hands of the unjust and to suffer out of love, out of protest against the oppression of his beloved, to be a victim because he refused to collaborate with the domination of others.

This is why the women play such a prominent role in Luke’s narrative. They come carrying with them the utter despair of what they have witnessed, witnesses to the total powerlessness of God on the cross. “What they discover,” writes McCabe, “is not the return of Christ in power but his absence: an empty tomb. This, the gospel is saying, is the beginning of faith, of real faith: to recognize the emptiness, the absence of the power of Christ in this world.” McCabe reminds us that Beto’s interrogator was likely also a “good Catholic,” but a Catholic who looked for Christ in the Sacrament, the authority of the church, the power of the priest.”

All these beliefs are just caricatures of the Catholic faith if they do not spring from a fundamental recognition of absence- what Jesus called a ‘hunger and thirst’, a desire for what is not there, a hunger and thirst after justice, a hunger and thirst for the kingdom of God. That is how we find the risen Christ in the poor, the oppressed: not in their goodness but in their need; in their hunger and thirst.

And so the women, the dependent, the victims, seek for what is not there; and it is only because they seek, it is only in their seeking, that the risen Christ appears to them. It is only if we have seen the injustice of our world, shared in the horror of a godless world; it is only if we can feel with and understand people who want to say: ‘How can there be a God, if I am treated in this way? Where is the power of God, who is supposed to be good and loving? Where is he to rescue me from the concentration camp, the military barracks, the death squads?’; it is only if we understand all this that we are ready to recognise his presence. It is only when we have said ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ that we are ready for resurrection.

1. Herbert McCabe, “Sermon: Remembering Romero.” New Blackfriars, 03/1990, Volume 71, Issue 836