Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Jesus faltering under the cross
If you visit the old
part of Jerusalem, you will notice, in certain places, so-called “Stations of
the Cross”: since the Middle Ages a route has been designed which seeks to
retrace the steps of Jesus from his condemnation by Pilate all the way to his
crucifixion and death. How historical all these fourteen stations are is a
matter of debate; but many Christians in the Holy Land and elsewhere have found
them a powerful means of meditation on the mysteries of their faith.
Three of those stations have to do with Jesus stumbling
under the weight of the Cross. No such incident is reported in the Scriptures,
but I have always found representations of this event very striking: Jesus, the
Son of God, faltering and falling, unable to carry the beam placed on his
shoulders. There is of course a very basic explanation for his weakness: he has
spent all night being cross-examined, then was scourged and beaten, has not
eaten for a while, and now is hauling an enormous piece of wood up a hill in
the Middle Eastern sun. That in itself makes him very human, just as the letter
to the Hebrews says “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted
as we are, yet without sin.”
Yet I cannot but think that other things weighed him down,
beyond the physical strains: the betrayal by his closest friends and
associates, his inability to get the Jewish people to believe his claims, the
seeming failure of his mission. In other words this man is also crushed by
mental, emotional and spiritual suffering and in that he joins the whole human
race in its suffering throughout history. So when I see images of Christ
faltering, I also see children recruited into armies or sold into slavery; I
see sick people, lonely and depressed neighbours; I see my friend Vincent in
prison who was abused as a child and has been abusive since; I see priests
unjustly accused of misdemeanours and their careers in ruins; I see the relatives
of the victims of last week’s plane crash, and the relatives of the pilot…the
list goes on and on. Somehow we all have our crosses, individually, as
families, as nations and peoples, and we all falter, stumble, feel crushed by
its weight. And so often it seems to make absolutely no sense.
When we see Jesus stumbling under the cross, what do we see?
Another human being crushed by the weight of existence, suffering senselessly?
Or do we see, in the words of Charles the Foucauld, “Jesus who has gone so low,
so that nobody need to be ashamed in his presence”? The same letter to the
Hebrews puts it as follows: “But we see him who for a little while was made
lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of
the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for
everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in
bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect
through suffering. For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have
one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers” In other
words, there is a solidarity in Christ sinking this low, so that we could
really call him brother. And if he were only a human being, this would be a
wonderful act of solidarity, but nothing more. The good news is that he was
also the Son of God. So when he “tasted death for everyone” he defeated it. The
Via Dolorosa, as the journey through Jerusalem’s old town is called, does not
really end at the church of the Sepulchre, or to be more precise, all that
there is in that church is an empty tomb. The very one who died on the cross
which he carried, also rose again, proving that none of the things that crushed
him could ultimately kill him, nor that they can kill us.
Ever since that Easter day we can know that no suffering, no
depression, no separation, no injustice lasts forever: there is light at the
end of the tunnel, there is resurrection, there is day after the night. Or to
quote a lesser theologian, John Lennon: “Everything will be okay in the end. If
it's not okay, it's not the end.” Happy Easter!
# posted by tino @ Wednesday, April 01, 2015 
