Peacemaking

Take Up Your Cross

I always want the Stations of the Cross to be more overtly "political". I want the powers- that-be to be called to repentance - a turning around to righteousness, mercy, compassion, and justice.

In the gospel reading from Mark for the second Sunday in Lent, Jesus called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, 'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.' " The second Sunday in Lent was the day after we had learned that our teammate Tom Fox was dead. He had made the choice to take up that cross.

This Good Friday, I knew I needed to enact an outward and visible sign of my continuing commitment to CPT. An act of healing. I asked if I could share the responsibility of carrying the large wooden cross through the Stations of the Cross.

Two of us shouldered it from the station at which the cross is laid on Simon of Cyrene and the station at which Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, commemorating where Simon takes up the cross, it's an uphill climb past the Little Sisters of Jesus and the Armenian-owned Jerusalem Pottery, past Station VI where Veronica wiped Jesus's face, to an intersection with Station VII, where Jesus falls a second time, then on up the hill again to Station VIII (our Station 4) where there is a cross carved into a stone set in the wall. I go there to place my hand on the cold stone and to pray for the women of Jerusalem. This day I thought of the mothers who have lost sons to illegal detentions, who are searching for them, some with the help of CPT in Baghdad. I thought of the women who cannot come to worship in Jerusalem because they don't have the proper ID or can't get a permit. I thought of the Muslim women, who along with Christian women, come to the Prison of Christ in the Church of the Resurrection to prayer for the safe release of their imprisoned sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands.

It was almost too much to bear, until I remembered the hymn "Take up your cross", in which we are called to

Take up your cross, let not its weight
fill your weak spirit with alarm;
his strength shall bear your spirit up,
and brace you heart, and nerve your arm.

Amen.

Good Friday
Durham NC

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