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GOOD MORNING.  As the day of the Crucifixion, Fridays have always had a particular poignancy for the Church.  At one time, Catholics ate fish on Fridays; and many Christians still commemorate the death of Jesus by observing a day of fast each Friday of lent. 

Throughout Lent, the suffering of Jesus is brought to the imagination of believers through a series of re-enactments – visual, musical and poetic –of the charged events that took place in Jerusalem early in the Thirties AD.  For me, the most moving – often performed every Friday – is the Stations of the Cross: meditations using the most visually striking art in any Catholic and many Anglican churches: fourteen images – snapshots frozen in time from the walk of Christ to crucifixion. 

I have often wondered why the need to re-imagine symbolically this death in history by an instrument of torture?  Perhaps because it draws our sympathy?  More, I think, because the story they tell is about real experience of frailty and fallibility.  The Stations of the Cross speak because suffering is so much part of life.  Most of us have experienced our own small versions of Gethsemane; many have lived their own crucifixions – private or public. 

In dramatising the suffering of Jesus, we are asked to look in a new way on our own; and the hope is held out that since for him it did not have the last word, for us, it will not have the last word either.

O king of the Friday whose limbs were stretched on the Cross.  O Lord who did suffer the bruises, the wounds, the loss.  We stretch ourselves beneath the shield of thy might.  Some fruit from the tree of thy Passion, fall on us this night.  AMEN.