Pope Francis has decided to celebrate Holy Thursday Mass in the detention centre for young people in Rome. His symbolic gesture, which includes washing the feet of 12 young prisoners, says something about Easter, and also about the implications of his desire for the Catholic Church to be a church of the poor.
In celebrating this mass in an Italian gaol the Pope is moving from its usual place at St Peter's Basilica in the heart of the Vatican to a prison on the margins of church and society. He will share the company of young offenders who are marginal in any society.
It is also a gesture of soldarity with people who accompany and serve prisoners and others on the margins of society. Those in whose imagination and lives marginalised people have a central place, soon become and feel marginalised themselves.
Anyone who stands with asylum seekers who are slowly drained of their spirit and mental health by prolonged imprisonment, are placed in the community without right to work and on allowances no Australian could live on, have no pathway to making their case for protection or to be reunited with their families, and are deprived of access to Australian law, find themselves on the edge of a society that approves of and inflicts these barbarities.
Anyone who has shared the confusion and pain of people who were removed from their natural parents, never to know them, and see a parliamentary session committed to an apology to them degenerate into a flurry of mobile phones and other fripperies caused by a leadership challenge, will find themselves estranged from political life.
It is natural to feel marginalised in the face of these and other brutalities inflicted on those you care for. The important question is, what do you do about it? Redress has to do with the imagination and with finding space. People do this in a variety of ways. For Christians to whom the rising of Jesus Christ from the dead is not simply a belief but is central in their imaginative world, the story of Easter is a central resource.
The story of the trial and killing of Jesus confirms that those who stand in solidarity with the marginalised will themselves become marginalised. In the religious idiom of his day Jesus said that prostitutes were loved by God and that God's kingdom was open to them. So he consorted with them. This was seen as both blasphemous and socially intolerable. So he was brutalised and taken outside the city to be executed.
By itself the execution of Jesus is a cautionary tale of futility. It can make it possible to recognise the barbarity of what human beings do to one another, and that pitching your tent with people who are marginalised and demonised may cost you your insouciance, reputation, social acceptance and even your life.
But Jesus' rising from the dead offers reason for hope and vindication for acting as if people do matter. It also gives assurance that nothing worthwhile in the most despised of human beings will be lost. The resurrection of Jesus provides a space for conversational prayer with God who knows all about being marginalised, and the costs of sticking with those who are marginalised, and who underwrites the hope for a future in and beyond this world.
All this is a resource for those for whom the Easter story is an operational part of their imaginative world.
I am not trying to justify faith in the resurrection on the grounds of its psychological benefits. Faith needs to be based in the conviction that New Testament testimony that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is reasonable. In any case it is impossible to make something central to one's imaginative world simply because it is useful to do so.
Nor am I arguing that this kind of faith in the resurrection is the only, or the richest, resource for those marginalised by their association with the marginalised. It is not the only resource, and I am not in a position to make comparisons. But this is how it does work for some Christians.
Finally I do not argue that faith in the resurrection is an effective pill to dull suffering. It offers a space to accommodate suffering. The Easter story is not about denying pain but about affirming life through and beyond it both for the marginalised and for their friends.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.