My parents made sure that our family prayed the Stations of the Cross as part of our family Lenten devotion each year. This is why I thought I would be somewhat prepared for my big trip overseas to participate in the Via Dolorosa marking Christ's journey to calvary. What I experienced was very different than expected.
First of all, it was loud and busy. It's funny how we make assumptions about things. Clearly, because the stations of the cross are always in a quiet church with a reflective atmosphere, the "real thing" would offer the same sort of quiet solitude for prayer. False. The Via Dolorosa occurs along a path throughout the Old City of Jerusalem. This means that we were traveling through the same streets as everyone who was simultaneously traveling to the store, school, or home. In the background of all of our Bible readings were normal conversations as well as annoyed glances as we clumsily filled in around the stations and blocked the street from others. Even more, the majority of this journey occured in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Instead of honoring Christ's death within the open arms of Christian hospitality, we entered into his Passion in the streets of a foreign religion.
So what was it that allowed me to enter into Christ's calvary with all of the noise, distractions, lack of hospitality? The fact that it would have been exactly the same at the time of Jesus. When Jesus was condemned to death, there wasn't a crowd of old ladies following Him with their rosary beads. Instead there was noise. The citizens and guests of the area were trying to go about their everyday lives when they had to move aside for a man carrying his cross toward the outskirts of the city. He was not embraced by the hospitality of a group of people, but rather, just one woman, Veronica. As Mary watched her son struggling with His cross, she wasn't amongst a symphathetic crowd. She knew who was to be crucified that afternoon, but the world did not stand in reverent silence as the Son of God passed through them, scourged, bloodied and head toward is brutal death. In the same way, the world did not stop for us.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre had its own surprises in store for us. This church marks the location of Golgotha where Christ was crucified and also contains the sepulchre where Jesus was buried. In the same way that the streets were full of noise, many chattering groups of people gathered in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Even more, the space in this church was divided between several different Christian churches who don't particularly like each other. This meant that when the one group began evening prayer, another group gradually got louder to try and over power the other one. As a Christian who is relying on these fellow Christians to protect and take care of the holy sites, I was glad to see the high level of maturity between the groups [sarcasm]. Sometimes it is just best to forgive and forget. But anyway, back to Jesus.
The last several stations along the Via Dolorosa occured in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We were fortunate to visit the Holy Land at a time when there are very few pilgrims making the trip overseas, so for the most part we didn't have to work around large congested groups of people. Nonetheless, we had to wait for short amount of time, probably half an hour at the most, to make it to the rock of Golgotha. Even though I was on a once in a lifetime pilgrimage walking along the same roads as our Lord, I became annoyed with the wait. It was later in the afternoon, and to be honest, I was probably hungry and ready to head back to the hotel for a nap.
During this wait, however, I noticed one of the girls in our group crying as she waited. I remember wondering how she was able to concentrate and focus on Jesus' death with the distractions of the noise and traveling fatigue. Later on as she was talking to the group, I realized that it was because she had connected our wait to that of Jesus' own suffering on the cross. While I was standing and craving pita bread and hummus, she had considered the long hours that Christ spent on the cross. Jesus had to wait, too.
We adore you, oh Christ, and we praise you.
Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
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