The Ninth Station: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

I’m fascinated by the human need to supplement the Gospels. In part we do it because we simply don’t know: where did Jesus meet for the Last Supper? What did Jesus do just before the first Palm Sunday when procuring a donkey? What were the names of the soldiers?

     Part of that need to supplement comes from our need to understand it as a means of conquering the story and thence tame it and make it safe. We can ignore its claims of overwhelming love.

     But there is one more reason: we need to move beyond the words to reach the deeper truths. Art, poetry and fiction help us enter the mind and heart of God, to estimate the cost, and then formulate a valid response.

     Until recently, all the standard lists encompassed by the phrase ‘Stations of the Cross’ included Jesus stumbling a few times and encounters a mysterious lady called Veronica. The story is simple enough: Veronica wipes Jesus’ face and finds his face has imprinted itself on the cloth.

     The story of Veronica does not occur in the Bible but the lack of detail does not mean it’s automatically untrue. The name itself comes from the Greek veron ikon, which means ‘a true likeness’. The story may record a residual memory of an actual encounter, or it could be a way of delving beyond, behind, below the sparse prose of the Scriptures to find a deeper meaning.

     We all need the truth of the Gospel in order to live it. We need to make it our own because otherwise it’s merely a story, a series of events, a list, like the Stations of the Cross when read in a language we don’t understand.

     There are many ways of earthing the Gospels and the Passion, but ultimately there is only one that works. We need to be a part of it. Jesus died for me. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son for me. We best achieve that ‘for me’ bit using ways that employ the imagination: we make ourselves a bystander, a participant, an actor in the drama.

     As we enter more deeply into the story, we move beyond our critical faculties and start to use the other parts of our nature. We feel the weight of the blows on Jesus’ back as they scourge him. We feel the chaffing of the beam of wood on our shoulders as we stagger through the streets of Old Jerusalem. We feel the agony of the nails, the anger and shame as the soldiers strip him naked, the outrage as they do this to an innocent man.

We become part of it the story in proportion that we start living the Scriptures. As we meet with Jesus in this way, something very much like his likeness rubs off onto us, and we become like Veronica’s cloth and take on his image.