A Holy Week without Easter Sunday?

It is sad to write it, but for millions of Christians this Holy Week should not have Easter Sunday. Only Fridays of passion. The naked calvary. The Jewish Jesus, twice crucified. And his cry to God from the wood of the cross, dying: “Why have you abandoned me?” could be repeated today in the land of Palestine, his own, by millions of innocent victims, fruit of imperialist interests.

The so-called Holy City, Jerusalem, in Israel at war, where the three great monotheistic religions of history should be embraced, is today the center of a hotbed of political-religious conflicts that are leading an entire people to extermination in the light of the sun. Meanwhile, as a counterpoint, the Jewish people, who were Jesus' people, are once again on the watchtower of old persecutions that seemed to disappear forever after the Holocaust, which, not perhaps because it is unique, is still written with a capital letter.

It is known the complicity that has always existed between faith and politics and between the three great monotheistic religions, which culminated in mutual persecutions and bitter wars. Today Christians, faced with the drama that Jews and Palestinians are experiencing, cannot forget that until the arrival of Pope John XXIII, every Holy Week, in the liturgical texts they prayed to God for the "perfidious Jews", those who had supposedly crucified Jesus. Today, that is history and Pope Francis was always, even before arriving at the Pontificate, a personal friend of the Jews.

Holy Week culminates with the metaphor of Easter Sunday, in which hope is celebrated against disenchantment, life over death, light over darkness, peace against war.

This year, however, that metaphor for life is drowned out by the deaths of Gaza children dying of hunger in the arms of their desperate mothers. The most primitive instincts of death and revenge are resurrected from hell. And the innocent victims of the demons of power at any price must be crying out like the Jew nailed to the stake: “Why have you abandoned us?”

We know very well the force of ideologies and dogmas placed at the service of power. Religious faith was called the “opium of the people,” lulled by false promises of liberation. And at the same time human beings, especially the most fragile, continue to need an extra bit of hope to face the walls of ignominy that crushes them.

Perhaps that anxiety that resonates this Holy Week among believers and agnostics, in the face of the tragedy experienced in Palestine, an emblem of atavistic hopes for resurrection, could be a symbol of the deepest tragedy that every human being experiences, no matter if believer or agnostic. It is that mystery that not even AI will be able to decipher, of the internal war that we carry inside between the fear of violence, heartbreak and the real or imaginary hope of resurrection.

The truth is that for the millions of Christians, the cry of the Jew Jesus who felt abandoned by God, dying on the cross, after having been sentenced to death despite the fact that Pilate declared that he considered him innocent of the accusations against him, is still alive and current.

In this special Holy Week, which appears without hope of resurrection, all those abandoned in the ditches of History, all the desperate people who in vain wonder why they have been abandoned to their fate, have the right to demand an account.

Demand them not from God but from the men in power, from those insensitive to the desperate cries of those dying of hunger, who wonder why they are being stripped of the right to be able to live in peace. Peace, another word stained with blood. Meanwhile, the hyenas of war seem insensitive wax statues impervious to the cries of anguish of those doubly abandoned to their fate.

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