The Stations of the Cross
Good Friday, 2025

1. Jesus is condemned to death.

1. We set up legal principles that reflect human beliefs about peace and justice. They are designed to impose peace upon an unruly people who must be controlled by the threat of violence. 

2. Sometimes mercy and clemency work for our purposes, but if they don’t there is always justice and punishment. We think of them as our tools, useful for what we want. 

3. Hearing God’s law that we should be holy, merciful, and just we persistently force these principles into our own modes of thinking but nevertheless call them God’s will and God’s law, and pride ourselves on our achievement. 

4. Inevitably, this arrogance resorts to irrational violence and we must punish even the just man for being just, for he has failed to conform to our ways, our customs, and the laws we created. 

2. Jesus is made to bear his cross.

1. Although he was “in the form of God,” and had given us ample evidence of his divine authority, on that critical day Jesus obeyed the civil authorities and religious leaders as readily as he obeyed his mother Mary and foster father Joseph. 

2. He had set his face like flint (Is 50:7) and despite his helpless nakedness and agony, he would not be put to shame. Rather he willingly embraced the punishment we dole out to one another.

3. Jesus falls the first time.

1. The human body is naked, defenseless, and subject to accidents, many diseases both acute and chronic; weariness, weakness, and age.

2. The One who insistently called himself the Son of Man because he ranked himself no higher than anyone, fell like any man as he carried the awkward burden of the cross. 

4. Jesus meets his mother.

1. On that fatal day, Mary found a way to present herself in the sight of Jesus, and to assure him of her abiding faith in him. She could not comprehend the entire meaning of his suffering – it’s beyond human comprehension and cannot be expressed in words – nor could she shield her motherly heart from the suffering he bore for our sake. 

2. In this last meeting, she came to assure him that she believed in him and would go with him. She would stand by her son regardless of the contempt that her neighbors, friends, family, and peers might have for him.

3. In the spirit of the Maccabean widow who watched as her seven sons were tortured and murdered, Mary fiercely remained by her son, defying the authorities with her compassionate presence. 

4. And he assured her that, like her, he would not doubt the wisdom and purposes of her God and his Father. 

5. They could not relieve one another of their profound sorrow and shared pain, but they could believe with united hearts that this work is good. It is good, all good, and supreme good. 

5. Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross.

1. Everyone needs help. We're so in assisted living. And the one who thinks he needs no help is the neediest of all, and the biggest burden. Jesus is not ashamed to accept help.

2. An African visitor to Jerusalem during that Passover weekend found himself caught up in a drama far deeper and more important than anything he could comprehend. Forced to bear the cross of Roman oppression, he sided with the victim; and his generosity led him to make the burden of the cross his own burden. Perhaps the soldiers and local populace mocked his courage and generosity but he followed the Lord even as he led Him to Calvary. 

6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face.

1. A woman of Jerusalem, driven by Compassion into the angry mob, stopped the Lord’s pilgrimage to Calvary long enough to wipe the blood and sweat from his face. If she was frightened for her personal safety she was compelled by her compassion rather than fear. 

2. Seeing Jesus, she looked upon the face of God and did not die. Rather, she lives forever with the saints. 

7. Jesus falls the second time.

1. His falling teaches us the dignity of weakness and uncertainty.  

2. The silence of God in that hour and the strength that is not revived by a supernatural grace remind us that our faith gives us no exemption from human suffering. Rather, unlike our sinful nature, we rise by Grace to the challenge and make it opportunity.

8. The women of Jerusalem weep over Jesus.

1. Crucifixion, the method of choice for the Romans, humiliates the victim and his family, along with his disciples, friends, and fellow citizens. Even those who opposed him may be humiliated as they see that this senseless brutality represents the consequence of their policies and decisions. 

2. The women of Jerusalem, grown accustomed to shame as they suffer the contempt of the wealthy, the upper classes, and men in general, appear to Jesus along the way to his death. Like him, their faces are set, they cannot be shamed, and they will not hide from the authorities, the Lord, or the God in heaven. 

3. Like the Argentine women who pleaded for their disappeared husbands, brothers, and son, the women of Jerusalem fill the silence of God with their cries and lamentation. They will never be silenced. 

9. Jesus falls the third time.

1. In the Bible, the ordinal third represents fullness and completeness. They found the child in the temple on the third day. On the third day, there was a wedding feast in Cana. Jesus pleaded three times that this cup of suffering might pass from him. 

2. His falling a third time signifies his total exhaustion, the end of his human strength. He can give no more. He is poured out like water. Aspiring to be neither God nor man; he is the least of men, a worm and no man. 

10. Jesus is stripped of his garments. 

1. In the Garden of Eden, the man and woman were naked, but they knew no shame. Sinning, they wrapped themselves in figleaves; and then the LORD covered their nakedness in animal skin garments.

2. But Jesus will not cover the shame and guilt he has taken upon himself and shares with us.

3. We remember the Lord’s nakedness in Crucifixion as his naked, unashamed, even daring, love for us. He cannot and will not hide his passion for us. He will expose himself entirely for us, that we might love and desire him all the more. 

1. If his nakedness shames us, it is because we fail to see the glory of God in his abject surrender to the will of his enemies. 

11. Jesus is nailed to the cross.

1. When a carpenter nails something in place, he does not expect it to come apart. When Jesus is nailed to the cross he must remain there, and whatever happens to the cross will happen to the one who is fastened to it. 

2. The nails signify his irrevocable commitment to us. He has never hesitated from the day he was baptized until this moment, nor will he turn back here.

3. Although he is nailed to the cross he is not held aloft by nails. Rather, his devotion to God and to us holds him aloft, despised by earth and ignored by heaven. 

4. He must remain there until the pain stops and the man feels nothing whatsoever. 

5. We learn of his nails only when the resurrected Lord commanded his disciple Thomas to “see the mark of the nails in my hands and put your  finger into the nail marks, and put your hand into my side. And do not be unbelieving but believe.” 

1. We know our Savior by the sign of the cross, by the wounds in his hands and feet and side. 

6. And we know our martyrs by the wounds they suffer for the faith with us. 

12. Jesus dies on the cross.

1. Jesus has said, “When I am lifted up I will draw everyone to myself.” (John 12;32)

1. We are drawn to him as iron is drawn to a magnet. 

2. His love is appalling to those who cannot see with the eyes of faith. They cannot imagine what his ignominious death means, or why it must happen. 

3. Some will argue that it was not necessary; we might have been saved by education and rationality.

2. His death is a scandal to the pious, and insane to the reasonable, but for those who believe in him, it is spirit and life. 

13. Jesus is taken down from the cross.

1. Like every other human being, his body does not disappear upon his death. We cannot walk away from his life or death, but must dispose of his remains. 

2. By this time the Roman soldiers have left Calvary, leaving his body open to the mob that might still want to commit sacrilege on his corpse. Have we not seen that spectacle on the bodies of Mussolini and Moammar Kaddafi? 

3. But the Lord’s faithful disciples will move in quickly, ahead of the mob and the vultures, to take him from the cross to his place of rest.  

14. Jesus is placed in the sepulchre.

1. Jesus had said, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, though you will follow later.” He had assured two disciples that they would be baptised as he was baptized, and they would drink the cup of suffering which he would drink – when their time comes. We pray that we will be prepared to receive it with the Lord’s own generous spirit. 

2. Unlike TV and movie dramas which rarely portray the funeral of slain villains or minor characters, civilized people honor the bodies of our deceased. We place them in tombs where they might rest in peace without the risk of desecration or the insult of scavengers. 

3. Although, by Jewish laws, anyone who touches a dead body is rendered unclean, his disciples do not hesitate to honor the dead. 

4. Because the Passover Sabbath has already begun, devout women will wait until the first day of the week to finish the funeral rituals and anoint his body. 

Fr Ken Bartsch, OFM Conv.