and people all over the land were dying from toxic exposure in factories.

Jesus met his mother, and three Navajo women talked about uranium contamination on the reservation, and the babies they gave birth to with brain damage and cancer. One of the women with such a baby in her arms told the crowd this: “We hear about what environmentalists care about out there. We live on dry land but we care about saving the whales and the rain forests, too. Of course we do. Our people have always known about the interconnectedness of things; and the responsibility we have to ‘Our Mother,’ and to seven generations after our own. But we, as a people, are being eliminated from the ecosystem, too … like the dolphins, like the eagle; and we are trying very hard now to save ourselves before it’s too late. Don’t anybody care about that?”

Jesus was helped by Simon and the number of those without jobs increased each day.

Veronica wiped the blood and sweat from Jesus’ face. Livestock drank and swam in contaminated canals.

Jesus fell for the second time.

The women of Jerusalem consoled Jesus. Children also played in those open disease-ridden canals where the livestock swam and drank and died from it.

Jesus fell a third time. The air was contaminated by the pollutants coming from the factories.

AIDS was a merciless plague indeed, the crowd was told by a dark, somber man with sunglasses and an Eastern accent. It started in Africa, he said, among poor, black people, and continued sweeping across continents, taking anyone in its path. It was the Murder of the Innocents all over again, he said, and again, there was lamentation, and weeping and great mourning, not just in Rama as in the Gospels, but this time all over the world. Jesus was stripped of his garments.

Nuclear power plants sat like gargantuan landmines among the people, near their ranchos and ancestral homes. Jesus was nailed to the cross.

Deadly pesticides were sprayed directly and from helicopters above on the vegetables and fruits and on the people who picked them for large ranchers at subsistence wages and their babies died in their bellies from the poisoning.

¡Ayyy! Jesus died on the cross.

No one had understood the meaning of the brief war in the Middle East, and Sofi went up to the portable podium, a bit reluctantly at first, to talk about her eldest daughter who never returned, although she had gone not to fight but as a civilian, a news reporter, as part of her job, that’s all. It was true that la Esperanza had always been outspoken, una mitotera. Everyone knew that. And now the Army said that although they knew she was dead they never produced a body for her to bury.

Christ was taken down from the cross.