Opinion: now not your mom's way of the go

opinion

Daniel Hughes and Sara Williams Opinion contributors

posted 2:27 PM EDT Apr 18, 2019

On respectable Friday, Cincinnati Christians will take a look at a 500-year-old ritual: the style of the go. The liturgy traces Jesus' course from his condemnation to his dying and burial.

whereas common performances emphasize the follow as an act of non secular piety, Jesus' dying turned into both public and political. Crucifixion changed into a kind of capital punishment within the Roman Empire, reserved for its worst criminals. Jesus' crucifixion, hence, changed into no longer in basic terms tragic, it turned into unjust.

here is the grounding for the manner of the pass for Justice, a public expression of the liturgy in Cincinnati. a group of faith leaders coordinated by way of the Intercommunity Justice and Peace core organizes the apply to endure witness to methods in which the struggling and demise of Jesus is connected to unjust suffering and death today. This respectable Friday in Over-the-Rhine's Washington Park, native Catholic and Protestant faith leaders, lay persons and early life will present stations involving ladies's empowerment and equality, racial and criminal justice, poverty, immigration justice and burdens in the Catholic Church.

The adaptability of the liturgy lies in its perennial certainty. The unjust conviction of an innocent man is widespread to our present old moment. An array of nonprofits has sprung up to position a determine on the miraculous variety of wrongful convictions within the U.S., predominantly for guys of color. 

it is a scenario which exhibits a criminal justice equipment that incentivizes swift indictments and plea deals to keep away from time-consuming trials and fill for-income prisons. one of the vital equal companies managing for-earnings prisons also have executive contracts to control immigrant detention facilities. In such facilities, terms like "efficiency" translate into inedible meals, inhumane conditions and abuse at the hands of poorly proficient guards. For undocumented immigrants as neatly, swift crook proceedings – rather than reasonable trials – are a precedence.

In Operation Streamline courtrooms, shackled migrants are offered seven by way of seven. The migrants have not been showered and appear in the clothes they wore days previous when apprehended, some after jogging miles in the wilderness. they are sentenced en masse and deported with criminal data. The identical political pressures that make expediency, instead of justice, the core of such complaints additionally have been present at Jesus' trial.

here is now not your mother's Stations of the cross. Its follow implies a responsibility to social motion. but its public, communal and ecumenical personality also attests that while all are in charge, no person stands by myself.

Daniel Hughes is a resident of fee Hill, pastor of Incline Missional group and a member of the Economics of Compassion Initiative and the Jubilee Cincinnati campaign. Sara Williams is a resident of Northside, member of Christ Church Cathedral, a doctoral student in religion at Emory university and adjunct instructor of social justice and comparative faith at Miami tuition.