Our Saturday Moment

A few years ago, I was privileged to join several of my colleagues from the Harvard Divinity School on a human rights fact-finding trip to Honduras. The country had been shaken some six months before by a coup d’état, and the situation, for many, remained desperate.

The stories we heard during our time in Honduras haunt me still. Stories of murder committed with impunity, of systematic rape used as a weapon to silence a resistance movement comprised mostly of women, of the targeting of the nation’s prominent LGBTQ leaders for assassination, of hands shattered by police batons to ease the process of identifying protestors, of property destroyed by arson to make way for foreign developers, of a world seemingly beyond the reach and the hope of justice. But despite the black despair with which one might expect to meet such conditions, hope – hope for a better world, hope for true peace, hope for justice – remained.

As Holy Week draws to a close, I can imagine no greater analog to the pain and the hope shown us in Honduras – and felt so keenly by all those who labor for justice in this world – than the shock, the aching, gnawing despair, that must have marked the Saturday after Jesus’ death for his earliest followers.

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