The Stations of the Cross were devised to help Christians walk with Jesus on Good Friday. This set were composed for the synod by Sister Inigo SSA of New Delhi. Her meditations are imagined witness statements from people who were there in Jerusalem, with contemporary insights, especially of the lives of women. With Mary’s great feast coming tomorrow, we turn to Sister’s 13th Station to remind ourselves what her ‘Let it be done to me’ cost her. The link below leads to the full service from the synod website.
What does Good Friday mean to us today? When we look around us, we see families falling apart,
society being plagued by individualism, people being terrorised in the name of religion, social
activists being silenced, freedom of expression being stifled and the cry of the poor and the
marginalised for justice growing louder. The times we live in are pervaded with hopelessness,
uncertainty, depression and panic.
The Holy Father invites the Church to journey on the Synodal path of communion, participation
and mission identifying itself with the lost and the least, by attentively listening to their cries, just
as Jesus walks to Calvary carrying His cross. Let us walk with Him in this Way of the Cross, adding
our own brokenness to Christ’s suffering and to bring healing to the wounded humanity
THE THIRTEENTH STATION: My beloved son on my lap!
We adore you ……….
He was a notorious young boy. On the day, he came out of the jail on bail, he was fully drunk and
was jaywalking in the middle of the road. A truck hit him and he died on the spot. A large
number of people, who saw his mangled body, heaved a sigh of relief. From amidst the crowd, a
lady with torn clothes was running to the spot. She lifted the body of her son onto her lap and
started wailing and weeping loudly calling him “my son, my son!”. How many times would he
have pushed her to the ground and left her to bleed! Yet…see the affection of the mother! A
mother is love personified. She is like the hen fighting an eagle that tries to snatch her chicks!
When the body of Jesus was laid on the lap of Mother Mary what could have been her feelings?
Were they joyful tears because her son lived and died for a noble cause? Or, were they sorrowful
tears because her son was cruelly killed by people, who misunderstood and wrongly
misinterpreted His teachings? We may never know. We learn from the Scriptures that Mother
Mary became the first disciple of Jesus’ Movement and she became the leader of Jesus’
missionary band! And so, Mother Mary is the perfect model to all the mothers today.
On our Synodal journey, like Mother Mary, we need to ponder over everything in our hearts and
get ready to ‘do whatever he tells us’. Let us place all our Synodal deliberations, hopes and plans
in those very hands in which the broken body of Jesus was placed.
We Pray: Dear Jesus, the formation of our children is in our hands. Whether they will be the
disciplined citizens or derelicts depends upon their formation. Help us to form our children
based on your exemplary life, into spiritual beings having human experiences, Amen!
Dwarka, New Delhi
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