Image: A memorial for the Jesuits murdered in El Salvador in 1989. Image from Creative Commons. 

Jon Sobrino knows something of suffering. A Spanish-born Jesuit priest, Sobrino helped to found the University of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador, an educational institution run by the Jesuit order. On November 16, 1989, Sobrino was away from home when members of the Atlacatl Battalion, or “death squads,” broke into the university and murdered all six of his Jesuit co-workers, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter. The murder was an effort to stop the witness for peace that these priests had begun in the midst of an ongoing civil war in El Salvador.

Sobrino is also a liberation theologian. This means that, for Sobrino, if we care about the story of Christ, we must also care about those who suffer, or those “crucified peoples,” who represent Christ’s body among us now.

He writes, “Cross means not only poverty, but death. And death is what the people of the Third World suffer in a thousand ways. It is a slow but real death, caused by poverty, so that the poor are those who die before their time … It is swift and violent death caused by repression and wars … And it is indirect but effective death when poor peoples are deprived even of their own cultures, in order to subjugate them, weaken their identity and make them more vulnerable.”

The cross is a symbol of the powers that be in this world; those oppressive systems that crucify and torture people who cry out for a new world order and a different way of living.

Those of us who live in the United States are complicit with this torture and are perhaps executioners by

default when our country launches drone strikes that kill thousands in other countries and when we cease to acknowledge the deadly systemic oppressions in our midst.

Good Friday is a day when the story of Jesus crucified on the cross is front and center in our collective Christian minds. It’s a day when Christians wrestle with the ever-present reality of suffering.

This year, if you have been following the news, it should not be hard to call to mind images of suffering in our world and in our church. Our headlines have been filled with stories of refugees; xenophobic political rhetoric; reports of bombings; accounts of rape and sexual abuse; discussions about who is welcome; and stories of poisoned drinking water and murdered children.

This list almost writes itself.

Sobrino suggests that to understand those who suffer as crucified, and therefore associated with the death that Jesus died, is to make it a religious imperative that we pay attention to and work against this suffering. We must  understand God’s preference for those at the margins. And, as Joanna Harader notes, we must start to unpack the ways that we are accountable for this suffering, too.

Sobrino reminds me to think about all of the ways that I am complicit in nailing people to the cross.

But the story of Jesus does not end on the cross. It ends with resurrection: a clear reminder that God is with those who suffer and that God is always working toward redemption. We’re called to be about this work, too.

Hannah Heinzekehr is the executive director of The Mennonite, Inc. This editorial originally appeared in the March edition of The Mennonite.