AS HOLY WEEK began, a mother sat wailing in lamentation of the death of her 11-year-old son, who had been playing football when the air strike happened. Ordinarily, we might set down her nationality, or name the politician who ordered the indiscriminate air strike, but the calendar has a way of sharpening our moral vision.
Holy Week invites us to view unfolding events in the Middle East in a different light. A cycle of violence, grief, and retaliation still dominates the headlines, but, through the lens of this week, it feels less like geopolitics and more like a test of human conscience.
Holy Week tells a story about power and its misuse. On Good Friday, the Roman state executes a man whom it deems a threat to order. Jesus has challenged the authority of the scribes, elders, and chief priests. He has insisted that the poor matter and that mercy outweighs ritual. The leaders of the Jews fear that Jesus will incur the wrath of Rome, which will lead to a crackdown that will destroy their nation and Temple. So, they incite the mob to threaten a riot that will place Pontius Pilate in a bad light in Rome. Holy Week demonstrates what happens when political authority, fearful and brittle, chooses force over justice.
In the Middle East today, we see echoes of that same dynamic. States and non-state actors alike claim necessity, security, even righteousness. The US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has started leading Christian services at the Pentagon, underscored that last week by praying “let every round find its mark”, and invoking “overwhelming violence . . . against those who deserve no mercy”.
On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV rebutted such perversion, recalling the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.” The Pope continued: “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
The language of necessity has a way of obscuring the human face. Civilian casualties are rendered as statistics. Suffering is flattened into abstractions. But the crucifixion is not a mass event: it is one man, abandoned, tortured, and killed. And yet in that one life all suffering is gathered. It asks harder questions: Who bears the cost of our political decisions? Whose suffering do we fail to see? And what would it mean to break rather than perpetuate the cycle of violence?
One of the most radical teachings of Jesus is the command to love one’s enemies. It is a line so familiar that it risks becoming an empty counsel of perfection. But to love an enemy is not to excuse wrongdoing or abandon the pursuit of justice. It is to refuse the logic that says that the suffering of the other is justified by our own. It rejects the idea that peace can be built on humiliation or annihilation. It places human dignity above considerations of strategic gain.
For all that, the church calendar does not coincide with the cycles of life or of the generations. For the woman whose 11-year-old was killed while playing football, there will be no resurrection on Sunday.
