Lent Midweek 5, March 26, 2026
- Mar 30
- 3 min read
Luke 23:39–43
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in[k] your kingdom.” 43 He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Solidarity with the least of these
The least of these.
Jesus lived with the least of these.
Jesus ministered to the least of these.
And Jesus died with the least of these.
The ones who were suffering from unjust systems that kept them in perpetual poverty. The ones oppressed by the powerful. The ones detained for daring to stand against empire.
To hang on that cross between those two “criminals” was the culmination of Jesus’s solidarity with the least of these.
His mother would promise the small child that their stay in Egypt was only temporary. That someday they would be refugees no more. Someday they would return to their home. He heard the story of his family fleeing from Herod's soldiers, the story of death rained down on an unsuspecting town.
Returning to Galilee carried its own risks, home still unsafe. Nazareth was marginally safer. Still the young Jesus witnessed the outrage of Roman soldiers passing through, commandeering the goods they wanted, detaining his neighbors on insubstantial charges, flexing their power callously. Jesus heard the men speak of excessive rents from landlords, crushing taxes from Rome, how hard it was to provide the daily bread their family needed.
In Nazareth, as he started his ministry, Jesus reads from Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Proclaiming that he is there in solidarity with the least of these. Not just to commiserate with them, but the get down in the dirt and share their lives, suffer their pain, die their death. Proclaiming that they matter, their lives matter, and they have dignity before God.
In doing so, Jesus calls out the powers that exploit labor and demand more of their fair share of wealth. The powers that strip the humanity from those they deem less worthy. The powers that would use whatever force they deem necessary to preserve their privilege. The powers that would detain, imprison, mistreat, and yes, murder anyone who stands in their way.
In those hours on the cross, Jesus became the criminal, the protestor, the agitator. The message was clear, “Defy us, resist us, and we will reduce you to nothing. We will make a spectacle of your suffering and make you nothing in death.”
But here, on the cross, Jesus proclaims salvation. You matter, you are valuable. You are not weighed by who you had to become to survive, by your worst act. You are worthy because you are God’s. Nothing changes that. I remember who God created you to be. And it is enough.
It’s still a world where people live in cages crafted from exploitation and poverty, and physical cages and cells, where so-called peace comes through violence, and anyone who resists is considered an enemy of the state. Just as Jesus lived with, ministered to, and died with the least of these, the cross calls us to do the same. To speak truth to power, to proclaim that cages and nails don’t have the last word, to embody the promise that even in the most desperate places, Christ is with the least of these.
And to affirm our own solidarity with the least of these, to be witnesses and companions in those desperate places. To proclaim that even now, God’s kin-dom breaks through. And it always will.