One of the great delights of a life in the ministry is the ecumenical Good Friday walk of witness. Over the years I have discovered that being a minister of multiple Churches causes me a bit of a problem and I have become the master of holding a service in one Methodist church and as the good folk set off to walk to the church of a different denomination, I would jump into the car and race to another Church where my Anglican colleague had led the worship at the beginning and walk through the village behind the cross, and I would lead a service at the end in the Methodist Church. I came to understand that I wasn’t actually DOING the walk of witness myself and at best I was a kind of clergy book end in the process.
Early on in my ministry when I had just three Churches, I completed the whole thing with my Anglican colleague and we took our turn in carrying the cross through the village. The Vicar told me before Easter that they had come up with a cunning plan to make the process easier and one of their people had manufactured a bespoke cross that was hollow inside. I admit that inexperienced as I am to carrying a big heavy cross on my shoulder (it isn’t something I do every day) this one felt incredibly light and the task of carrying didn’t even cause me to break into a sweat and as I walked solemnly through the streets of the village, I became increasingly conscious that were completely missing the point.
When Jesus said to the disciples “if you want to come with me, you must take up your cross every day and follow me. The whole point of what he was saying meant that there was a cost attached to discipleship, the cross was always meant to be heavy and as we read the gospel account of Good Friday, Jesus stumbled and fell as he carried the huge, heavy lump of wood on his shoulder, he was already in agonising physical pain having endured a long period of torture, but he was also tormented by the emotional and mental torture, he had been rejected, mocked, scorned and the cross he was carrying was the final bit of his torture, this was to be his final, painful resting place.
Maybe we work hard at trying to make life easy, we like our creature comforts and maybe it was reasonable for the people of the village to make the task of the Good Friday walk of witness easier. I guess that they had done a risk assessment and come to the conclusion that expecting somebody of pensionable age to carry a great lump of wood on their shoulder could be a risky business and nobody wanted that responsibility and I find that difficult to criticise. Even so, maybe we missed the point?