Station 12

Questions:

What has been the harder parts of your human experience?

When have you felt best in your body?

When have you felt the worst in your body?

Meditation:

You know, you’re not supposed to have a “Jesus Rises” station in the Stations of the Cross. It doesn’t exist in the traditional stations. These stations are supposed to be a meditation on Jesus’ journey to the grave, which exhumes our eventual journey to the grave, which invites us into the grace, empathy, and love of a Savior who is familiar with the hardest parts about being human. These meditations are about descent. We save rising for Easter morning.

The church tradition I grew up in felt very uncomfortable with things unsolved. It felt very uncomfortable talking about the cross and the grave without talking about the Resurrection. My guess is none of us like a story that ends in the darkness of the unknown because it reflects the future reality of our entrance into the unknown. And that transition frightens the ba-jee-bees out of most of us.

My hope in these meditations is that we begin to see that the Divine is intimately familiar with the hardest parts of our human experience. From betrayal to heartbreak. From pain to silence. From appearance to disappearance. We can see that Jesus did not insulate himself from those hard parts, but actually went through them, like you and I have to. In the Triune God are embodied memories of the hardest parts of being a human.

Jesus partook in being embodied.

Being in a body. Being here. Being finite. Having limitations and weaknesses. Having a heart that beats that he wasn’t in charge of. We have hearts that are beating that we aren’t in charge of. All of us are here, right now, by something that we are not in charge of.

Jesus came back to a body in His resurrection. All the hard parts about being human were not the end of Jesus, and maybe they aren’t the end of us too.

So I give you this image to contemplate the resurrection of embodiment. A new shoot growing out of the chopped stump juxtaposed with the wooden staff of a good shepherd who still declares,

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays his life down for his sheep.”