Stations 1-2

The First Station

Jesus is condemned to death.

We gratefully remember and praise you, Jesus, because your life teaches us how to live as your disciples.

After you have been taken into custody, Jesus, by the Roman occupation forces, you are whipped, crowned with thorns and derided mercilessly. Though wrongfully accused, you absorb the condemnation of political authority and the approving nods and ridiculing shouts of your own people. No one speaks up for you!

(Silence)

Revenge is in vogue when prisoners are captured by the military. Being corralled and detained before questioning is traumatic. While being questioned, the prisoner is at the mercy of the interrogator who most often is at liberty to use varied forms of psychological and physical pressure to extract information. Beyond those dehumanizing tactics, five years ago the U.S. deported Afghan prisoners – some as young as 14 and 15 years-of-age - thousands of miles away from Afghanistan to the American naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, to endure not only imprisonment without legal representation but also the excruciating treatment of confinement to cages while shackled and with no opportunity to communicate with each other, let alone their
families. They have been judged and found guilty without trial. No one speaks up for them!

As long as we remain sheep, we overcome. Even though we may be surrounded by a thousand wolves, we overcome and are victorious. But as soon as we are wolves, we are beaten: for then we lose the support from the Shepherd who feeds not wolves but only sheep. – John Chrysostom

The Second Station

Jesus accepts his cross.

We gratefully remember and praise you, Jesus, because your life teaches us how to live as your disciples.

You have, Jesus, with us in mind absorbed all the humiliation and violence begun when humanity initiated cruelty as a means of dominating others and implementing control over them. War seems to always find means to justify some violent end – and to declare heroes in conquest and killing. You put the lie to that philosophy in accepting your cross and making nonviolence the only way to peace.

(Silence)

There are noble moments in war when individuals sacrifice their lives to save others. There are countless testimonies of such goodness amid the hellish mayhem of grenade, mortar and rifle fire. But such heroism is also evident in natural cataclysms and accidental mishaps. A civilized people do not require war in which to exemplify heroic behavior. Such energy can be channeled into social justice endeavors like ameliorating hunger and poverty, advocating for wrongfully incarcerated individuals and coming to the aid of disasters’ victims.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometime hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism… – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reflections by: Rev. Sebastian L. Muccilli