The Vicar's Monthly Letter
VICAR'S LETTER
Dear Reader,
In a few days time as I write (just before the February half term holiday) I will be setting off for Israel along with a group of people from St Peter’s Church on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We will be visiting many of the places that play an important role in the Gospel stories of Jesus’ life – Bethlehem where he was born, Nazareth where he grew up, the shores of Lake Galilee where he spent most of those last three crucial years of his life along with his disciples, and Jerusalem which he visited on many occasions throughout his life but most significantly where he was executed on a cross, buried in a borrowed tomb and first seen by his disciples following his resurrection that first Easter.
Not surprisingly, it has been those sites in Jerusalem that are associated with Holy Week and Easter that have been the most visited and most venerated over the centuries since Christ’s earthly life and especially in the last seventeen hundred years after St Helen (the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine) rediscovered them and founded the shrines there that have marked their place ever since.
For many Christian visitors, the key to their pilgrimage has been following in the footsteps of Christ along the so called Via Dolorosa (“Way of Sorrows”) – walking along the same route on which Jesus carried his cross through the city streets to the hill of Calvary just outside the city walls. Although it was outside the walls in those days, Calvary (also known as Golgotha) is now inside the ancient walls after a rebuilding by Hadrian in the 2nd century, and is nothing like the “green hill” referred to in the words of the well known hymn. Even in Jesus’ day, it was more of a craggy outcrop than a grassy hillock, but nowadays there’s little to see of the hill at all. Instead it’s all covered by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – a medieval building that encompasses both the site of the crucifixion and the remains of the tomb nearby where Jesus was buried. (Apparently when St Helen investigated the area, she was taken straight to these two revered sites by Christians whose families had lived in the city ever since Christ’s time and moreover, she found them covered in Christian graffiti dating back to the 1st century, and so was convinced of their authenticity).
It became the tradition for pilgrims to stop at various points along the route (so called “stations”) and to remember the parts of the bible story that occurred at those points, or in some cases, extra parts of the story that were added according to later traditions (Jesus falling three times and a woman called Veronica wiping the blood and sweat from his face for example) and saying appropriate prayers for themselves and for others at these points. Thus evolved the tradition of the “Stations of the Cross”.
A further development of this tradition was to make the experience somehow accessible to Christians who couldn’t travel to Jerusalem, and so, on the initiative of the Franciscans, who were given custody of the pilgrim sites in the Holy Land in 1342, the practice of praying and meditating on the “Stations of the Cross” spread from Jerusalem to churches throughout Europe and later around the world.
For a long time, the number of “Stations” varied from five to over thirty but what are now regarded as the fourteen “traditional” ones became fixed early in the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth century most Roman Catholic churches had a set of fourteen pictures, carvings or simple numbered crosses arranged around their internal walls so that people could walk around the building from one to the next, saying their prayers and remembering the events of Jesus’ route to the cross – almost, in their mind’s eye, as if they were walking through the streets of Jerusalem itself.
More recently this practice has spread beyond the Roman Catholic Church and is now commonplace in many other denominations as well, including those from the Protestant tradition. The United Reformed Church on Station Road in Redcar has a series of brightly coloured posters depicting the “Stations of the Cross” around its walls for example. Those at St Peter’s are made from painted ceramic tiles and are of a style that I for one, haven’t seen anywhere else. As far as anyone remembers, they appeared in the 1970s but no one seems to know where they came from, so if anyone knows anything about their history, please let me know.
We tend to use them, and to walk and pray around them, on the Wednesday of Holy Week (7.30pm on 31st March this year) as well as sometimes using them with school groups, but I am thinking about other opportunities when we could use them more regularly (throughout Lent or on one Friday are month are common practices in many churches and cathedrals).
Another very effective way that I have prayed through the “Stations of the Cross” in the past has been to follow them along a route up a hill. Having discovered such “Stations” depicted in life size statues in Gozo (the island alongside Malta) and in carved tablets in varies places in Italy where there are paths winding up a hillside, a few years ago I led people from a number of local churches up the hill from Westerdale Church to Ralph’s Cross, stopping at regular intervals and using posters we’d brought with us to remind us of the “Stations”. The following year we followed the permanent “Stations” that run up the hill to the Lady Chapel near Osmotherley (above Mount Grace Priory). Both were moving occasions but unfortunately the first was hampered by deep snow drifts and the second by torrential rain. We decided to give it a miss the following year in case a hurricane struck!
Of course, the “Stations of the Cross” is just one way in which we at St Peter’s (and Christians throughout the world) mark the events of the first Holy Week and Easter. For us this year, our services and activities will range from a solemn Meditation on the Cross on Good Friday afternoon, to school Easter services at the end of term; and from a shared Communion service in the Upper (Zetland) Room on Maundy Thursday (the evening of “the Last Supper”), to our Easter Eggstravaganza Coffee morning on the Saturday before Palm Sunday (strictly speaking a bit premature, but we hold it then so that folk can get their Easter eggs in good time for Easter itself). Look out for more details of these and other events in this and next months’ magazines and please feel welcome to join us for any you fancy.
In all these ways, we will join with Christians everywhere in making the events of Holy Week and Easter more real to us and proving that you don’t have to go to Jerusalem to find the Christ who walked there 2000 years ago, but can meet him in Redcar in your lives today, for God longs to meet us wherever we are.
Yours,
John
A PRAYER
Almighty
God,
whose
most
dear Son went not up to joy
but first he suffered pain,
and
entered
not
into
glory
before
he was
crucified:
mercifully
grant that we,
walking in the
way of the cross,
may find it none other
than the way of life and peace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.