Via Crucis Grid Blog: Station 8 -Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

I spent Palm Sunday morning curled up on the floor sobbing, which is perhaps not the standard manner of entering Holy Week, but then, I’ve never been very good at following the program. I spent the weekend with a group of women, and there was a lot of crying, and I still feel like my insides are decomposing. Maybe that’s not such a bad place to start a post about one of the stations of the cross.

Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem in Luke 23: 26 – 31. It goes like this:

As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed. Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us” and to the hills, “Cover us.” For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

I guess if you are being led away to your own crucifixion, you tend to be in an apocalyptic mood. I don’t know everything that Jesus meant by all of that, but I imagine it had something to do with the way that evil doesn’t stay contained in one place very well. They thought they could just kill one man, and that would be the end of it, but then people started talking resurrection and they had to keep going with the killing.

Jesus knew that his death would lead to resurrection, but there’s a whole lot of death that just leads to a higher body count. Maybe He was saying, “You think this is bad? Darlins, this ain’t the half of it, and if you want to mourn it all, you’ll be wailing until your throats are raw and all you can do is whisper out your grief. And you still won’t be done, because all this death isn’t going to stop for a long long time.”

Weep for yourselves, because the guys who write this down won’t bother with your names. Weep that you must live in a world that says you are less. And weep for a world where soldiers will force the Simons of the world to participate in grave injustice just because they can.

Weep for your children and your children’s children and all the children after that, because two thousand years later, we still have executions and there isn’t time to keen a death wail for the death of every innocent – or the guilty. Half the time, we don’t know which is which. Child soldiers, child prostitutes, children living on the streets - innocent doesn’t look like it’s supposed to.

Weep because there are still too many women weeping and beating that spot on their chest where their heart is supposed to be. What with war and starvation and prisons and all the things that happen in dark houses, there are daughters of Jerusalem crying somewhere every hour of the day and night.

They weep because we still don’t get it, and keep thinking that we can crucify the wrong sorts of people and that will be the end of it. They weep for what the world is and for what it could be and for how hard it is to live in the space between.

In Luke, it says that the weeping women were following Jesus. I think they still are.

(Click on the grid blog schedule to read the other stations.)

Comments

[Liam]

This is a great post. I also struggled a bit with the apocalyptic part of this station and how to resolve it with a compassionate Christ. You did it very well.

[Paula]

you left me speechless...great post

[Heidi]

"Weep for yourselves, because the guys who write this down won’t bother with your names." weep indeed...

[Jane R]

Christy, I just found this (the Web is a wonderful and awful thing) -- I'm a regular visitor of yours but I wasn't headed for your site, I was just doing a search because I'm offering a meditation on this Station of the Cross on Good Friday and I decided to roam around a bit. This is so powerful and true that I will have trouble getting away from it -- but I may at least use it as a jumping-off point. (If I do more than this, I will credit you!)

I now have to say what I didn't say months ago when you started talking about feeling called to write and then about feeling the pull to graduate school: I expected both times that you would say you felt called to ordained ministry, or at least to some form of religious or spiritual leadership (note that I am not being denominational here :-)).

(And some of us have a triple vocation in writing, scholarship, and ministry - so the one does not exclude the other.)

Just a thought from an old (well, middle-aged) spiritual director type and sister on the Way.

Peace to you -- and thanks for this powerful reflection.

Jane

[Christy]

Jane -
Glad you liked it, and feel free to use as much of it as you like, as long as you give me credit.

As for the call to ministry part - that's tricky. On the one hand, I do feel called to helping people connect with God and telling spiritual stories in a new way. On the other hand, I do not function well in religious environments, church is really really hard for me, seminary might kill me, and I don't think I could jump through all the hoops that getting ordained requires.(Lots of history behind all that.) I haven't figured out how to reconcile those two things together yet.

If you do, let me know.