A Station of Silence, a Station of Witness

Recently I discovered a very brief video on my phone that I must have taken by mistake when I was walking the Way of the Cross with a group of fellow pilgrims in Jerusalem a couple of summers ago. The 5-second video shows our group walking on a narrow street in the early morning summer light. A young man who has been whitewashing a wall in preparation for a Muslim festival puts down his brush. A shopkeeper rolls up the grill in front of his shop. A cat darts across the alleyway in front of my feet. Our group rounds a corner and disappears from view. Such an ordinary morning in Jerusalem.
In an eerie way, it may have been on just such an ordinary morning that Jesus walked toward the place of his crucifixion in the gentle spring sunlight. I once brought a Bible Study group to stunned silence by suggesting that there were not crowds of people paying attention to Jesus’ crucifixion, and that part of the sorrow of that day was the violent normalcy of Rome’s “solution” to the problem of a man the local leaders saw as an agitator. Part of the travesty is that the people responsible for Jesus’ death saw him as completely expendable. After his death, they went on with their day.
The terrifying events that were drawing forth the full attention and power of God were ignored by most of the people who saw the Galilean man being force-marched toward his cross. Even his dearest friends could not bear to stay close. Perhaps one of the Stations of the Cross should be a complete blank, to convey the lack of sustained attention anyone was willing to pay to the particular heartbreak of the one man Jesus, his family, and his friends.
But am I any braver in paying attention to the crosses borne by people in my own time? There are so many stories in the news now that I can hardly bare to attend to: women held as sex slaves by ISIS fighters, children carrying automatic weapons in wars they do not understand, practically any news coming out of South Sudan or Syria. Yet every one of those people caught in the violent web of our time is at the center of God’s concern: the woman who shushes her baby with his old-man face; the refugee child in a cast-off American college tee-shirt squatting by a campfire in a field of trash; the weary family stepping into an over-loaded boat. In Holy Week, I try to fix my attention where God’s attention is fixed, to let my stomach lurch not with immobilizing hopelessness but with simple openness to my neighbor’s experience as I study the pained faces of God’s beloved who greet the dawning of this very same day with me. I pray that God will make something of my attention, that I may be empowered to step into the frame of that blank Station of the Cross and take my place as a witness, courageous and partial and frail.
To whom and to what will you give your attention this Holy Week?
What Station of the Cross would you add to the traditional fourteen stations?
 
Jane Patterson (@JaneLPatterson1) served on the Adjunct Faculty since 2010 and was appointed assistant professor of New Testament beginning June 1, 2013. In the Master of Divinity program, she teaches courses in Bible and Spiritual Formation; in the Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation, she teaches a course on the Bible as a resource for pastoral caregivers. Outside the seminary, she is co-director of a ministry called The WorkShop that guides laity in the use of the scriptures for discerning how to live faithfully in all aspects of daily life.