Walking the way of the cross during Easter is traditional. You can do it in Jerusalem (the via dolorosa), or closer to home you can do it at your local church. We are invited to 'walk' the path of the saviour each time we read the story from Gethsemane to tomb in dramatic form. I like the latter best when we (the congregation) take all the parts other than the role of Jesus. We walk the road from Gethsemane to tomb not out of guilt and as an excuse to self-recriminate. Nor do we grovel as we walk in a religious version of a show-trial. Nor is the journey an occasion of (inner) chastisement leading to catharsis, like some kind of pagan festival. We walk as sinners, sinners who know they need a saviour. It isn't hard to know our need: one only has to look at the newspaper of history, or one's own heart and experience, to see the universality of sin and our need to be saved from it.
People these days recoil from the term 'sinner'. In my experience, they cite either the self-recrimination that has gone with 'sinner' in the past, a self-recrimination aimed at controlling 'the sinner'. Alternatively, some people cite the way 'sinner' has been used to point the finger at others, with 'sinner' in this version of history partnered with judgementalism.
Ironically, a culture that has given up on 'sin' and 'sinners' is captive to the very consequences it wants to avoid. Denying the universality of sin/human failure - that is, pretending that there is some part of me that is quarantined from the imperfect world I have grown up in - makes those very consequences more likely. In naivete about the world ("Let's all just be kind to one another" or "Why can't people just love each other?"), to extreme narcissism (think identitarian politics), and then onto scapegoating and cultural polarisation (think social media), we have core features of the contemporary cultural landscape.
Instead, Christians walk the via dolorosa as sinners in need of a saviour, and a saviour appropriate for our mutual sinfulness. Walking the via dolorosa as a sinner is, ironically, to get off the see-saw of self-recrimination and criticism of others. Walking the way of the cross with the saviour also brings with it freedom, and should make us more difficult to control through guilt.
Why is this? Mostly because we are loved, that's the point of the whole Jesus thing. And as beloved, we don't have to hide from our sin. We can receive the salvation of the saviour. We don't have to be in the centre of the universe: we can let God be the centre and receive God's love and forgiveness, renewal and freedom.
God's way of dealing with human sin is to go deeper into the human predicament by being a victim of sin. And we must go deeper into our sin by acknowledging our need for a saviour. This is the path that yields genuine repentance (not guilt), and we emerge with a new empathy for the human condition, which we share.
