“During Holy Week, Christians remember Jesus’ death as a confrontation with – and triumph over – the powers of empire. Jesus’s crucifixion was God’s ultimate act of solidarity with persecuted people — an act that calls us into radical solidarity with the crucified people of today.”

As a key practice this Holy Week, we invite the Boston Christian community to join Solidarity is Sacred, a movement devoted to reclaiming the story of Good Friday to stand in solidarity with our immigrant friends and neighbors.

Read more below as the organizers share the theological heartbeat of this initiative, which transforms the Stations of the Cross into a powerful public witness for Christ-centered sanctuary and justice.

By Sarah Hansman, Stef Grossano, and Katy Fazio 

In March 2025, just blocks from First Church in Somerville – where one of our authors is the pastoral resident – plain clothes, masked men grabbed a Tufts graduate student off of the street in broad daylight and put her into the back of a car. For hours, the young woman’s attorney could not figure out where she had been taken. The student, later identified as Rümeysa Öztürk, had her visa revoked and was shipped thousands of miles away to a Louisiana detention center – all because of a student journalism piece Ozturk had written for the Tufts Daily. Members of First Church Somerville knew Ozturk and her friends. Fear and anger set in. Immigration enforcement tactics were changing and many wondered who would be next. The next 12 months revealed a campaign of cruelty towards immigrants that we continue to live through today.

Immigration enforcement tactics have long threatened the safety of our neighbors. But in this moment of authoritarian breakthrough, state violence is intensifying, causing fear and outrage in our communities. We have seen a record number of deaths in US detention centers (including Emmanuel Damas on March 2, a Haitian man living in our Boston), a near total ban on asylum, and the continued separation of families. 

We are the co-coordinators of a grassroots, ecumenical coalition of people of faith responding to this moment. Our response to this moment comes out of our shared humanity, in recognition of the fundamental dignity in each person that has for too long been violated. Our distinct voice, however, is a Christian one. Our strength comes from drawing upon who we are and what we believe, which breaks through with striking clarity on Good Friday. 

We are a coalition of Christians from various faith traditions and experiences. Sarah is a doctoral student in theological ethics, a hospital chaplain, prison minister, and Catholic woman committed to bridging the worlds of the worlds of theology, ministry, and community organizing. Stef believes in the creative power of human beings and the Holy Spirit to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. She has tried to flex that creativity and Spirit as an organizer, a prison educator, a facilitator, a legal worker, and now as the queer pastoral resident at First Church Somerville, UCC. Katy is a children’s minister, mom of two, and a gardener- all roles  that require hope for the future and the pursuit of peace. This is the second year we are coordinating this action, because we believe that Good Friday is a unique moment for us to join together, as people of faith, to remember the memory of Jesus’ crucifixion and how it calls us to be in solidarity with the crucified peoples of the present.  

Christians follow a God who was murdered by the state so that no one else would be subjected to such cruelty. The moment we forget this story is the moment we forget our call to solidarity as followers of Christ.  If the cross is a spiritual instrument, it must be a mirror challenging us to never allow what happened to Jesus to happen to anyone else. 

Last year, we joined together on Good Friday for Sanctuary is Sacred, a public worship and action, to call out persecution and scapegoating and demand  that our state government protect our immigrant neighbors and refuse cooperation with ICE. We made it clear that the Jesus who was himself scapegoated calls on our politicians, and each of us, to pick up their cross and walk with the oppressed.

This year, we return stronger for Solidarity is Sacred: Public Worship & Action for Immigration Justice. We refuse to be scared into silence by the disappearance of our neighbors and the deployment of ICE into US cities. We refuse to fall prey to scapegoating narratives that seek to turn us against each other, self-interest that feigns ignorance, or despair that believes that there is “nothing we can do.” We believe public worship and nonviolent collective action matters and so we come to Good Friday with three main goals. 

1.  By publicly praying the Stations of the Cross, we hope to provide a theological framing and spiritual grounding for this political moment that moves us closer to solidarity with our immigrant neighbors and to God’s call to set the captive free and to break every yoke. 

The Via Crucis, or Stations of the Cross, is not only a reenactment of distant history, but as a living prayer through the streets of our own time. This longstanding Christian practice traces the path of Jesus’ suffering and execution at the hands of empire. We will join together in front of the JFK Building in downtown Boston, the location of the Boston Department of Homeland Security Office, to pray five out of the fourteen Stations of the Cross and stand in solidarity with crucified peoples of our time. The stations we will observe include: Jesus is condemned to die, Jesus meets his mother, Jesus falls for a third time, Simone of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross, and Jesus dies on the cross.

As we mark the moments along Jesus’ final path——each station reveals Christ present in the crucified peoples of today: in the bodies of those detained and deported without due process, the grieving mother torn from her child, the imprisoned denied medical assistance, the refugee turned away at the border. 

To pray the Stations is to see the world as it truly is—to name suffering, to confront injustice, and to refuse to look away. In a world that still builds crosses, we walk the stations to say: this is not the end. Even as we confront the forces of death—racism, poverty, xenophobia, colonialism, environmental destruction—we do so with the conviction that love is stronger, and that resurrection is real.

This walk is a prayer, a protest, and a public witness. We ask not only what happened to Jesus, but also what is happening to our neighbors, and what is being asked of us. We pray to be awakened. We pray to be changed as people and leaders.

2. To bear public witness to our Christian faith and values. 

We refuse to cede the public square to White Christian nationalism. Too often, Christianity has been distorted for political gain and against our most vulnerable communities, including our migrant siblings. Our Catholic Vice President has wrongly used the ‘ordo amoris’ to justify the Trump administration’s nationalist agenda and Christian Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has used isolated and faulty Bible interpretation to defend Trump’s immigration policy. We are mindful that the story of Good Friday itself has been used across for centuries to foment violence and prejudice against our Jewish siblings and is a part of the legacy of antisemitism today.

We repent for and reject any weaponization of Christianity. We feel called to provide a counternarrative that witnesses to another way of being Christian. Migration is at the heart of the Christian story. From the Exodus, to the story of Ruth and Naomi, to the Holy Family, scripture tells us of people on the move. And Jesus’s death on a cross declares where God chooses to dwell—not with the powerful, but with the broken, the cast off, the dispossessed. 

3. To create opportunities for local, interfaith relationship-building and platform existing ways to take action. 

We learned from Minneapolis that voices of faith matter and so does knowing your neighbor. Scripture teaches us: love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:39). But before we love our neighbor, we have to know our neighbor. Who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29)? Massachusetts has a robust network of immigration justice organizations and coalitions to say no to state violence and yes to local and state networks that protect our communities. Rather than ask with despair, “how can I, one person, make a difference?” We join together as neighbors, in solidarity, to see how much power we have, and provide pathways to take action going forward. 

Will you join us? 

We will begin at the JFK Building, home of the Boston office of the Department of Homeland Security  to pray the Stations of the Cross. After the liturgical portion of our event, we will march together, up to the State House, to hear from our final speakers. These leaders in the immigration justice movement will share how you can take further action to be in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors today. Come weary, come hopeful, come yearning, come energized, come lamenting, and bring your communities with you.

We have an incredible group of co-sponsors behind this effort. Massachusetts Communities Action Network (MCAN), MA TPS Committee, Pax Christi Massachusetts, Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ (SNEUCC), Catholics in Communion, UniteBoston, Episcopal City Mission, Center for Public Theology & Migration, and First Church Somerville, UCC

📅 Good Friday, April 3rd, 4PM

📍 Downtown Boston

🔗 RSVP here: https://bit.ly/goodfriday2026