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Passion of Christ

  1. Lesson One
    From Triumphal Entry to Criminal’s Arrest (Luke 19–23)
    21 Activities
    |
    1 Assessment
  2. Lesson Two
    Death of the Messiah: Crucifixion and Burial (Matt 27, Mark 14:1–15:20, Luke 23, John 19)
    24 Activities
  3. Lesson three
    Suffering Messiah (Psalm 22, Is 53, Zech 1–13)
    19 Activities
  4. Lesson Four
    Sacrifice and Passover (Mark 14:1–26, Luke 22:1–46, John 13–14)
    14 Activities
  5. Lesson Five
    Resurrection and Witnesses (Ezek 37:1-14, 47:1-12, Matt 28, John 16, 20)
    20 Activities
    |
    1 Assessment
  6. Course Wrap-Up
    Course Completion
    1 Activity
    |
    1 Assessment

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Passion of Christ Suffering Messiah (Psalm 22, Is 53, Zech 1–13) In Front | Workbook: The Solidarity of the Passion
Lesson 3, Activity 16

In Front | Workbook: The Solidarity of the Passion

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Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

Throughout history many Christians have understood Jesus’ passion as a powerful act of solidarity with us in our suffering, and at our most vulnerable. Listen to this late 19th century criticism of child labor by the Christian theologian Léon Bloy: 

For here is the horror of horrors: child labor, the utter misery of little ones exploited by an industry yielding riches. And this in all countries. Jesus had said: “Suffer them to come unto me.” The rich say: “Send them to the factory, to the workshop, into places that are the darkest and deadliest of all our hells. The efforts of their weak arms will add something to our wealth.

One sees such poor children, whom one could knock over with a breath, put in more than thirty hours’ work a week, and these workers, O avenging God! are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The young woman of the world herself perhaps is also unaware – as Dante did not know – of what her clothing and fine underwear have cost. Why should anyone tell her about the deadly exhaustion, the never-sated hunger of the wretched little girls all too delighted to kill themselves for her beauty?

The Evangelist Saint Luke heard Jesus Christ’s Bloody Sweat falling upon the ground, drop by drop. What are we to think of the sound, slighter still and much less listened to, of the countless steps of those poor little ones going to their task of sorrow and wretchedness demanded of them by the damned, moving thus toward their elder brother in the Garden of the Agony, who calls them and awaits them within His bloodied arms?

Source: Léon Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute, translated by Jacques Maritain, 1947, p. 182.

  1. What relationship does Bloy suggest between Jesus and the victims of child labor? How does this affect the way he views the marginalized and disadvantaged?
  1. In what moments of suffering and disappointment in your own life have you felt God especially near?