--Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures
In the Stations of the Cross—Jesus falls three times. The crossbeam was too heavy. Jesus was exhausted from lack of sleep, from the beatings that went on and on. In some stations of the cross there are as many as seven times where Jesus falls. The only scripture reference to any fall in the Passion story is the occasion when Simon of Cyrene came forward and lifted the cross from Jesus’ back.
We know one thing here. Jesus stumbled under his heavy load. Maybe the church was trying to teach the Gnostics a lesson. They always said that our Lord appeared to be a real person. More like a heavenly ghost. But God, they said could never, ever be a human being like us. But the church knew better. Ireneus in his book, Against Heresies would write it bold letters: What he appeared to be, he was. He was what he seemed to be.
And so once again we deal with the hard side of Jesus’ humanity and our own. In the play, Green Pastures one character says, “Even bein’ God ain’t no bed o’ roses.” He really did become like us. And if this be true—he was confined to the limits that we know all too well. He just could not go another step. He stumbled under the load.
And I think the church put the several falls of Jesus in the Stations more than once to help us remember our limits. Jesus fell, too. Who likes limits? Who likes confinement and strictures? As we get older most of us realize, like Nicodemus that we all run out of time. But in our own journey sometimes the load of our lives gets too heavy.
If you ever read John Updike’s splendid series, The Rabbit Stories you will remember how human Harry Angstrom really was. His nickname was Rabbit. In four books Updike told the story of Harry (Rabbit) from a young man all the way through his life until we come to the final volume which the author calls, Rabbit at Rest. In this last story Harry is in his mid-fifties. He is rich and semi retired after a serious heart attack. He moved to Florida and spent six months out of the year. He returned to the northeast the other six months to see how his son was running the Toyota business he left to him.
His first act on returning home after being gone six months was to look around at all the things that he had almost forgotten. It was always a journey down memory lane. He drove by the place he was born, the house he had grown up in. He went by his grade school and then the high school where he was once a basketball star. He passed the church where he and Janice were married and the house where their first born died. Then he drove down a street lined with Bradford pear trees in full bloom. He stopped the car and marveled at the beauty and whiteness of those tall trees. He did something he hardly ever did. He just sat there looking. Looking. As he sat there tears trickled down this hard-nosed businessman’s face. He started the engine and went home. When he got there he told Janice about the trees. “They must have planted those trees after we left. I don’t remember those trees being there.” And his wife said, ‘Oh, Harry it’s been in all the papers. They’ve been working on that project for ten years.” He said, “I never saw anything like it. It just broke me up.” And she said, “You’ve seen. It’s just that now, now you see things differently.” He knew and she knew that they were talking about how that serious heart attack had altered the lenses through which he looked at life.
And we stumble under our own heavy loads sometimes life looks different. Theologian Leonardo Boff says that the true grandeur is to accept the frailty and the humanity of the limits placed on us without resentment. For dealing with our own limits is one of the hardest tasks we face.
So the church kept the stories of Jesus falling. It reminded them of his humanity that was so much like ours. I believe as pilgrims would move in their own churches to this third station, many looked up and saw in that heavy load their own load and in Christ's fall their own fall. It isn’t the end of the journey—but heavy loads and stumbling were part of Jesus' journey and the roads we travel too.
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