The Stations of the Cross (2) Adapted from www.preachingpeace.org

It seems to be human nature that we want to leap over the challenging times of life and get to the good parts.  That is understandable.  However, I believe we need to not avoid the dark nights of the soul and embrace, or at least not deny those times.  How can we begin to know something of ourselves and of God when the dark times engulf us and threaten to overwhelm us?  What can we learn from those times when everything including God seems to have abandoned us?  We desire to quickly move from the despair of Good Friday to the joys of Resurrection Sunday.  I used an adaption of the Stations of the Cross on our Good Friday service. 

Last time I introduced the Stations of the Cross and looked at the first five stations.  This time I will finish our journey with Jesus to Golgotha. 

Station VI: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem 

“Weep not for me, but for yourselves and for your children.” The women of Jerusalem want to weep for you as though your fate were unrelated to theirs, as though the violence you suffer did not own them as well. You turn their sympathy back on them; remind them that your fate is their fate, too.

How many times have we contemplated your Passion, Lord, and wanted to cry for you? How many times have we wanted to weep because of your pain, and not because we caused it? How often have we blinded ourselves to our complicity in violence by feeling sorry for the victims?

Station VII: Jesus falls Again

Jesus, you have done all that you can do. When you fall this last time, you entrust the remainder of what must be done to us. There is no more strength. You are utterly beaten, defeated, but we are not finished. Like the potter’s clay, we will now make you into what we need you to be.

How many times have we seen another’s weakness as an opportunity to shape them, to change them into what we want them to be? How many times do we take advantage of the fact that you are too weak to resist, Jesus, and fasten you to the Cross?

Station VIII: Jesus is nailed to the Cross

Hanging for hours on a cross is not cruel enough, Jesus. Watching you suffocate will not mollify our rage. Life has been so unfair to us, we have such rage that we have to use nails, instead of the traditional ropes. Rage bleeds away as nails, meant for wood, cut easily through human flesh.

How many times have we allowed our rage to drive us to cruelty? Cruel acts? Cruel speech? How many times has another borne the scars of our rage?

Station IX: Jesus dies on the Cross

We stand in stunned silence as we survey the result of our sin. The Lord of Life hangs dead from the tree. The peace we pursued as we chased you up the hill refuses to come. As we gaze upon you, Jesus, our victim, the realization dawns. Violence will never again bring peace, and we are terrified.

Mute with horror, we stumble to our homes, as though the earth were moving under our feet. The ground itself seems unsteady as we contemplate a world without violence. On what will we stand?

Station X: Jesus is taken down from the Cross.

We have all departed by the time the guards permit those who love you to bring you down from the Cross. Once the spectacle ended, we are compelled to leave. There is something horrible and fascinating about you as you hang there, and it frightens us. We leave the task of dealing with your body to those who are already unclean.

How often, O Lord, have we fled our own horror, left the care of the dead and the dying to others? How many times have we let our fear of the power of death drive us into hiding?

Station XI: Jesus is laid in the tomb 

In a tomb that you could never have afforded, those who did not abandon you, those who refused to join the mob, lay your body to rest with great tenderness. There is nothing divine in the torn flesh, nothing holy in the bloodied brow. There is only sorrow, deeper than the greatest trenches in the ocean. Sorrow.

You will breathe life once again into our deadened spirits, Jesus, but not on this day. Today we walk as those robbed of hope, shuffling from one place to another as though we belonged in the tomb with you. Perhaps, without the breath of your new life, that is precisely where we belong.

Silence