Jesus came triumphantly into Jerusalem, but he knew what faced him. The death would be terrible, and the suffering that would accompany it would be searing.

Worst of all would be the pain of abandonment. Jesus would die abandoned by everyone. His friends and disciples would run away and leave him alone.

From among his very best friends, one would turn him over to the authorities and another would deny knowing him. Jesus’ experience of abandonment even seemed to extend to his Father: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

In dying his lonely death on the cross, Jesus brought salvation to all those who are abandoned by others: the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, the lonely elderly, those suffering from communicable diseases, the hungry, political prisoners, prostitutes, those on death row.

Jesus died and rose that they might be liberated from their abandonment.

The ultimate injustice is for a person or group to be treated actively or abandoned passively as if they were nonmembers of the human race. To treat people this way is effectively to say that they simply do not count as human beings.

U.S. Bishops, Economic Justice for All, 1986: 77