Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
March/April 2006

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Easter Symbols

The Lenten Cross | The Washing of the Feet | The Imposition of Ashes
The Stations of the Cross | The Adoration of the Cross

The Lenten Cross

How do Methodists keep Lent? Well, much like other Christians I guess. Some of us 'give up' things, and at Church we hold services on Ash Wednesday and of course at the end of Lent in Holy Week. We find ways to reflect on the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

One very important way begins with the Christmas tree. At the beginning of Lent we turn it into a Cross. We so often forget that there is, and has to be, a connection between Easter and Christmas. It is the baby of Bethlehem who goes to the Cross.

And then, week by week, we attach to the cross symbols of the Passion – the 30 pieces of silver with which Jesus was betrayed by Judas, the whip, the nails, the purple robe and the crown of thorns. We also add the bread and wine of Communion, the Palm branch that marks Palm Sunday and the bowl and towel reminding us that Jesus washed the feet of his friends. As we attach these items week by week we sing When I survey the wondrous Cross. By Good Friday the cross is heavy with symbols of pain and suffering, and I for one find it deeply moving.

But perhaps the most moving moment of all for me is at the first service on Easter Sunday morning. Reverently, item by item we remove the symbols of the Passion and replace the Purple robe with a white robe, and the crown of thorns with a crown of flowers. And then everyone who comes to church on Easter Sunday plays a part. We all bring a small bunch of flowers to church and have the chance to attach them to the cross. The transformation is extraordinary – the weight of suffering turns into the joy of new life.
The events of Holy Week and Easter are for the Christian absolutely life-changing. We Methodists are sometimes (with some justification in my view), accused of being a very 'wordy' denomination. But we are rapidly learning that God has given us five senses, and we need to use them all in worship. The visual impact of the Lenten Cross helps us to enter into the experience in a way that mere words will never do.

Veronica Faulks

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The Washing of Feet

At the Last Supper, Jesus stripped to the waist, put on a towel and washed his disciples' feet. It is difficult for us to realise what this would have meant to his disciples. We keep our feet, slightly smelly, in our socks and shoes. Cleaning them is not a big deal. However, in Jesus' time roads and streets were dusty, people wore sandals and feet became sweaty and filthy very quickly. In any decent home (by which one probably means a nice middle class one like that of Mary and Joseph), there would be a number of servants. It was the job of the most junior servant to wash anybody's feet on their arrival so that they would not bring the dirt from outside inside. For Jesus to wash his disciples' feet was saying to them that he would take on the role of the most humble servant amongst them. It was for that reason that Peter protested most strongly – for him the idea of his leader performing the most vile and lowly job on him was almost blasphemous. The shock factor does not stop here. Cleanliness was an integral part of Judaism in Jesus's time – there was a whole series of rituals about washing hands, etc, before one performed religious customs and there were elaborate rules about what made you clean or unclean (if you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, probably the prime reason why the Levite passed by was that to touch a dead body would leave him unclean and unable to lead worship for a week). The washing of feet, even in this culture, was not in any sense a religious or spiritual event. For Jesus to put this act at the heart of his self-revelation at the Last Supper was quite extraordinary.

In church liturgy, washing of feet has been present since the time of Jesus. We know, for example, that Henry II in remorse at the murder of Thomas a Becket, after entering Canterbury on his knees washed the feet of the monastic community of the cathedral. The Maundy Thursday tradition of the Sovereign giving money to senior citizens was originally less about the giving of money and more about the King washing the feet of some of his most humble subjects. It was for this reason that flowers play such a prominent role in the ceremony even today (although the Queen does not now wash anyone's feet) – the floral scent was designed to counteract the pong of unwashed feet. Each year in St Mary’s we recall this tradition when I wash the feet of a small number of parishioners on Maundy Thursday. It is, I have to say, a tradition followed with great nervousness – people really do not want to have their feet washed – but the symbolism is very powerful and the connection with Jesus’s own last supper is profound.

Ross Collins

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The Imposition of Ashes

Ash Wednesday is so named because, of course, it involves the Imposition of Ashes. We are reminded at this ceremony at the start of Lent of our own mortality and in the words of the funeral service "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" recall our ultimate destiny. In each of the services we hold on Ash Wednesday the sign of the cross in ash is made on the foreheads of each of the congregation as a sign of their mortality and penitence. The ashes are made from the palm crosses from the previous Palm Sunday as a sign of our own "betrayal" of Jesus.

Ross Collins

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The Stations of the Cross

The Stations of the Cross is a popular devotion used by individuals or groups who wish through prayer and reflection to follow Jesus Christ on his way to Calvary. It is a powerful way to contemplate and therefore enter into the mystery of Jesus` gift of himself. It is a form of devotion that involves the senses. The Stations themselves may be simple pictures placed around the interior of a church or elaborate carvings found outside. Their purpose is an aid to stimulate the imagination and help you place yourself within the scene in front of you. As you walk round you may kneel in prayer or simply stand in contemplation, sharing in what Jesus is experiencing.

The purpose is to allow your imagination to rove around each of the Stations in turn and go on a journey allowing yourself to be probed and questioned, relating the images to your own experience of pain and suffering and offering them to Jesus. For example the first Station is Jesus standing before Pilate. Here Jesus suffers in silence. We can ask ourselves how often do we suffer in silence or are we a little too quick to find a way out rather than offer our pain to him. Here we may also wish to remember and pray for those we know who are suffering in the silence of an illness or failed marriage.

Often if you are with others, a verse of a hymn is sung between each of the Stations as you move round. There are set prayers and responses, moments of kneeling and silence.

When Christian pilgrims first started to come to Jerusalem, they were anxious to see the places where Jesus had been. The street that Jesus walked down on the way to Calvary is still called the Via Dolorosa, the way of pain. Pilgrims would stop on the way for prayer and remember what had been experienced by Jesus. It was this experience that they wanted to recreate by setting up their own Stations at home. They first appear in the sixteenth century in the Low Countries. Generally there are fourteen and most of them are incidents found in the Gospels.

What matters most is to follow Jesus in his passion and to see ourselves mirrored in him, asking that we might share in his trust, patience and courage as we ponder the darker aspects of ourselves and the world around us.

Paul Holland

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The Adoration of the Cross

This is the title given to one part of the service held in catholic churches all over the world on Good Friday afternoon, in memory of the passion and death of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. On every other day our prayer life centres around the mass, in which his unique sacrificial offering is made sacramentally present. On Good Friday there is no mass. The scripture readings include Isaiah's prophecy of the suffering servant led as an innocent lamb to the slaughter, and St John's description of the Passion. Who would not feel the need to pause and reflect on what we hear?

So after prayers are offered that all mankind may share the fruit of such a life laid down in sacrifice, a veiled cross is brought to the sanctuary. As the veil is removed we are reminded by the priest that it was upon the wood of the cross that our Saviour died. We are invited to kneel as a token of adoration – not of the image, of course, but of the Son of God who humbled himself and was obedient to the extent of dying on the cross. The cross is supported by two acolytes. Then priest and the whole congregation approach as to kiss the cross. It is a custom that is recorded as taking place in Jerusalem in the fourth century; in mediaeval English there are references to the 'creeping to the cross'.

The cross is acknowledged the universal symbol of our faith; it is carried before us in our silent witness through Barnes on Good Friday morning. Our outward show of respect for a material cross may seem, as St Paul says, foolishness to some, but for us it is a profession of faith in 'Christ crucified, the power and wisdom of God'.

SS Peter and Paul preached fearlessly about the death and resurrection of Jesus, that he had been put to death 'by hanging him on a tree'. It was, at the time, a most shameful way to die. But there was a wealth of theology in that phrase, a parallel between the tree in Eden that was the old Adam's downfall, and the tree of Calvary on which the second Adam paid, by his blood rather than silver and gold, the price of our atonement. This tree is a symbol of triumph, not shame. There is the story of Constantine using the cross as his standard to achieve victory in battle. Whatever else, there was from the fourth century a marked outpouring of devotion to the cross, as witnessed in the poetry of the hymns composed in that era – 'for God is reigning from the tree'.

Fr Anthony Logan

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