Sunday Soul: Resurrection

Would you recognize him?

Christians around the world are celebrating Resurrection today. During Holy Week they commemorate the wrongful arrest and torture of Jesus, and the rest of the year most find no irony in ignoring all those wrongfully arrested and tortured in our own day. Lately I have been trying to remember if Jesus even asked for his resurrection to be celebrated. If so, I don’t remember it. I remember him asking for the last supper ritual to be “done in memory of me.” And I remember him saying “whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.” Surely Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the hundreds deported with him to a terrorism prison in El Salvador constitute the least of these.

Sunday Soul posts are usually my favorite to write, but I’m starting to feel that caring for the soul is just one more self-medicating tendency, one more way to avoid, to pretend, to deny.

If you’re looking for something for your soul I love Rob Bell’s RobCast episode “She thought he was the gardener” (start at minute three). I listen to it every year. It’s about how Mary Magdalene encountered the risen Christ the morning of his resurrection, but mistakes him for the gardener, a story full of beautiful symbolism which Bell masterfully draws out.

And it raises the question, Would we recognize him?

My guess is no, if you don’t see him in Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man made to suffer a lifetime of torture, a man made into a spectacle to soothe a lesser man’s ego. If you don’t see him in KAG, you probably wouldn’t have recognized him either.