This year, reading the gospels during Holy Week, I can’t help but put myself in Mary’s shoes. What must it have been like to see Jesus at the cross, her little boy arrested by the same government oppressing her people?
This woman, who sang the Magnificat when she learned she was pregnant, who dreamed about overthrowing oppression and building a new world, must have been so proud of her son. He had taught people a new way of being together and fought to build the world she taught him about.
And then, for daring to envision a new world, Jesus was sent to the cross, arrested, tortured, and murdered by the state. And she was powerless to do anything but stand at his side, making sure he knew that he wasn’t alone.
Mary joins the scores of other mothers who can do nothing but watch and mourn while their children are killed due to systems of oppression far beyond the human scope. I think of Mamie Till-Mobley, who, after her son Emmett was beaten and mutilated, found the courage to hold an open coffin funeral to raise public awareness about racism. Of all the mothers who became activists after their sons were murdered.
Make no mistake: While these mothers went on to do amazing work creating a more just world, the deaths of their children were a tragedy. And so it was with Jesus at the cross: While so much good came from his death and eventual resurrection, his death was horrible. It didn’t need to happen.
In the 11th century, Anselm of Canterbury came up with what today we call the satisfaction theory of atonement—the idea that Jesus Christ had to die so that humans could be redeemed from sin. Sin, Anselm believed, creates a debt to God that humans can never repay. Only Jesus, fully human and yet without sin, can repay this debt.
Today this idea forms the basis of large swaths of Christian theology, both Catholic and Protestant. And yet some theologians, such as Elizabeth Johnson, argue that Jesus never had to die for our sins.
Instead, Johnson says in an interview with U.S. Catholic, the crucifixion demonstrates that “what we go through by way of agony and suffering is not unknown to God. God, who created everything, chose to join the world’s suffering, undergo it, and know what it means from the inside.”
In other words, God suffers with all of us—God was in and with Emmett Till and all the other Black people murdered due to racism. God was suffering with their mothers. That doesn’t mean their suffering was justified.
In February 2025, Sam Nordquist, a 24-year-old transgender Black man from Minnesota, was murdered after being kept captive and tortured for more than a month. It happened about 20 miles from my house in Western New York, in a state that prides itself on being a safe haven for LGBTQ+ people and in a county many trans and genderqueer people are moving to, perceiving it as a safe haven.
This Lent, I imagine Sam’s mother at the foot of the cross, grieving for her son. A son who loved animals, who worked at a home for vulnerable adults, who was trying to build a better world.
This Lent and Holy Week, as we remember the suffering of Jesus, let us also remember the suffering of Emmett, Sam, and all those who died because of the world’s sin. If God suffers with us, then God also calls us to end that suffering.
We know that the story doesn’t end with the cross, it doesn’t end with grief. The resurrection is coming, and we are all called to build the world Mary and all these mothers dreamed of—a world where no more children are crucified by systems of violence and hate.
This article also appears in the April 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 4, page 9). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Pietà by Weisz-Kubíncˇan, Arnold Peter
