There is a very specific feeling many of you may know, when you return home from a journey and something feels different and you realize that something is you. The ancient word “pilgrimage” describes an intentional journey we might decide to take with the idea of coming home transformed.
As we prepare to celebrate Good Friday and Easter together, I want to offer an old tradition of preparing for these holy moments in which faith is at its hardest to fathom. From the first centuries of the church’s history, devoted people wanted to go to Jerusalem to retrace Jesus’s steps to the cross and see with their own eyes the hill on which Jesus died for the sake of the world.
This journey has always been very hard if not impossible for most folks to make, and so very early on, churches started putting art—statues, carvings, murals and paintings—around the edges of cathedrals for locally bound pilgrims to walk and return home transformed. The classic form of this is to have 12 different stops on a loop, each depicting a part of the Good Friday story, and to offer quiet space for people to meditate on each of these moments. It is by taking a moment to stand in Jesus’s shoes that we can see most clearly how he stood in our shoes so that we could all be free.
This pattern came to be called “the stations of the cross,” and Nacoochee Presbyterian Church has licensed the work of artist Scott Erikson to install 12 stations of the cross outdoors around our building between Palm Sunday and Good Friday so that anyone from the community can stop by to walk the stations in their own time.
We are all invited to come and see that before we were hard pressed by life and tempted to give up, Jesus felt that same temptation. When we feel betrayed by a parent, or a spouse, or a friend, or a government, Jesus has known that same betrayal. He was mocked, and he was condemned. He felt in his flesh the unfairness of the world, and he held on through it all in life and in death so that love could still have the last word.
This physical reality that he felt in his body is the seed which he carried into his tomb. He did this so that green shoots might rise up from within, break through to the sun, and grow into a tree whose roots can remove any stone, sidewalk, street, or foundation that separates God’s people from God’s love.
In preparing this installation, I have drawn deep strength from the reminder that Jesus understands everything we face, and that he remains right there by our side every step of the way. There is nowhere we can go that he has not gone before us. There is nowhere he has gone, in heaven or on earth, that is closed off to us, and we hope this week will serve as a reminder to anyone and everyone that we never, ever face the trials of this life alone.
Nacoochee Presbyterian Church is located at 260 GA Hwy. 255 in Sautee Nacoochee
