Tomorrow, when hundreds of millions of Christians — and a majority of students, faculty, and staff of the college — celebrate Good Friday, they will be remembering that in Jesus, God was unjustly murdered. Jesus was brought before the political authority in his land, Caesar’s representative, Pontius Pilate, who put him to death.
But the Gospels go out of their way to make clear that this grave enactment of evil was not due to Pilate’s unfortunate misapplication of the law. No, Pilate rightly discerns that no charge had been successfully brought against Jesus. Pilate correctly judges him to be innocent. But Pilate still has Jesus executed. The appalling evil of that day was compounded because it was no accident; it was no misunderstanding. Pilate knew exactly what he was doing, and did it anyway. He sent an innocent man to death because it was politically expedient for him to do so. His attempt, with a splash of water, to keep his own hands stainless of this decision, would be comical if it wasn’t the deadly serious act of a cowardly, small man.
In a horrific irony, this Holy Week we are seeing the same story played out — an innocent man punished because a leader thinks it will please the crowd. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an illegal Salvadoran immigrant who became a legal U.S. resident in 2019, was wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15 due to what the Trump administration has admitted was “an administrative error.” Like Pilate 2,000 years ago, Trump knows this man has been convicted of no crime. Like Pilate, Trump so far has refused to use his authority to enact justice. Garcia is being held in a brutal, maximum security prison that was built to house the very kind of gang members that Garcia was granted asylum in our country to escape. The Salvadoran government has stated its intention that no one incarcerated there will ever return home. That makes Trump’s refusal to correct his mistake the equivalent of a death sentence for this innocent man.
Think it’s sacrilegious to compare this event with Good Friday? It was Jesus who told us to make this very kind of equation. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). The point is not that Abrego Garcia is a sinless sacrifice; of course he isn’t perfect. Jesus’ point is about us: How we treat such a person reveals what we think about Jesus.
On the day that Jesus was crucified, no Roman citizen stood up to Pilate to demand that he maintain justice and release the innocent man. This Good Friday could be different, if even a fraction of America’s Christians demand that Trump act justly. Trump, like Pilate, is choosing injustice because he judges injustice to be politically expedient. Would that the Christians on this campus, while they prepare to worship their unjustly crucified Lord, also cry out for justice for Abrego Garcia. What will the crowd of Hillsdale’s Christians be shouting this weekend? “His blood be upon us”? Or “Return us Kilmar”?
Cody Strecker is an assistant professor of theology.
