The Vial Dolorosa Early Good Friday

The pilgrims’ map of Jerusalem on Good Friday is of narrow limestone-paved streets crowded with a cacophonous mixture of local Muslims and Jews and Christians from around the globe. They will walk the centuries old, worn stone pathways, stopping at each Station of the Cross. Many will weep; most will be in awe; few will leave unmoved.

The Via Dolorosa bears no physical relation to the path Jesus took from Pilate’s judgement hall to Golgotha. The Roman path which preceded the present Ottoman city, and now lies three meters below the Old City streets, ran from South to North, not East to West, from the Cardo of the Jewish Quarter and the Souk of the Muslim Quarter to the Damascus Gate. And that street lay atop the rubble of the destruction of the Jerusalem streets Jesus walked on that sad Friday, which more probably ran from the West, in what is now the Armenian Quarter, to the barren (not green) hill now subsumed inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian Quarter.

Jerusalem, Madaba Map, 6th C

These maps are not of utmost importance, other than the fact they take in every part of the Old City. The modern streets, with their throngs, offer sufficient backdrop to grasp the normal human chaos of festivals, and the absurd normality that accompanies events of greatest importance. It is the Gospel map which matters today, as Christians inhabit the sacred space of Jesus’ death within the walls of their churches. From the high ritual of the great cathedrals to the simple piety of believers gathered between simple borrowed walls, the truest story is retold of the unjust arrest, trial, and execution of a Galilean Jew in a remote corner of the world. The story is recited, re-enacted, and re-imagined. A particular death in the Judea of Roman history reverberates with urgency. And outside the walls where Christians are gathered, a world remains indifferent to momentous events.

Why? Because this death matters more than others. And his death is not the end, but the fulfilment, of the purposes of the God and Father of Jesus: ‘God so loved the world that he gave his son, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16); ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13).