Today has become on of my favorite days of the week. Not because it is Friday or the end of the work week. I am self employed. Lots of Fridays I don’t work. Lots of Saturdays I do. No today is special because at our new church we celebrate the Stations of the Cross every Friday during Lent.
A relief of the Stations at Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Avranches.
Now for those of you who may get whip lash right now… Yes I and my family now attend a church that celebrates not only Lent BUT the Stations of the Cross (pssstttt ALL OF THEM too!). Yes this is quite a change. It is a welcome change. One that needs no explanation from me other than we are home.
The practice of the Stations of the Cross goes back to at least the time of Constantine and his mother’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It has changed throughout time and at one point in history there was somewhere around 35 stations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_cross . The modern version (14 stations) is a few hundred years old. And yes the service varies depending on whether you are Anglican, AMiA, Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed Anglican, Episcopal, or Anglican Catholic. The best way to understand them is in my opinion to watch the movie Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson. He uses the traditional Roman Catholic Stations to set up his movie. My wife and I watched that again two weeks ago. It made this service come alive even more in our minds.
Even if you wish to take out the stations that some reformers (modern ones) have issue with this is still a practice worth attending and in fact making a part of our liturgical lives. To many who attend churches with no liturgical calender, who do not celebrate Lent, Easter, Christmas, Pentecost, Ascension Day, all of those great Holy Days this is a “silly papal notion” to quote one person I was talking to lately. However for those who condemn this as superstition or papal practices how many times do you experience and remember the Crucifixion of Christ in your year? How many times do you relive the awful notion that we stood in judgment of God incarnate? How many times a year do you remember the awful torment that our Savior endured because of His love for us? The Man of Sorrows is deformed, beaten, naked, on the cross for us. Thru God’s love of us we are redeemed. Made whole. Christ thru His Cross redeemed the world (please that does not mean universal salvation or universal sanctification) the fulfillment of John 3:16.
There is value in reliving the moments of our Saviour’s life. Learn from them. Experience them. Let them move you in the beauty of His love for us. Yes this is a change for me. Yes there are things I am accepting with a humble heart that I do not yet understand. Yes I am changed and humbled after every service.
My point here is not to throw stones at expositional preaching, non-liturgucal calender churches, or the Totally Reformed movement. My point here is to only say that we should in fact take time out of our lives to remember what our Savior did for us. As a Church.
Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again!
I really like when people are expressing their opinion and thought. So I like the way you are writing