The Stations of the Cross

Mike Hill, “Station IV: Jesus Meets his Afflicted Mother,” pencil drawing, 30” X 27” (2003)

In 2003 I commissioned fourteen professional artists from across the state of Texas and from a wide range of denominational backgrounds—from Lutheran to Greek Orthodox to Baptist to Pentecostal—to produce an original art piece for a Stations of the Cross exhibit that I had planned for that season of Lent. 

One of my favorite pieces was by the Dallas-based artist, Mike Hill. Created as a pencil drawing, Hill’s work corresponds to Station IV: “Jesus Meets his Afflicted Mother.” This is how he describes his thinking behind the piece:

“I took the idea of Jesus and Mary’s inability to embrace as an image of suffering. In the central panel a woman approaches to embrace a young man: her son. But their broken, armless bodies make it impossible for them to embrace and thus comfort each other.

The left and right panels show the wounded arms and hands of our Savior. And in the top and bottom panels, hands reach towards each other to finally meet at the center of the Cross.”

I love how universal this image is. Each of us has likely been in a relationship with someone who has suffered in a way that’s painful to watch.

We want to make it stop but we’re ultimately powerless to rescue them from it; we're so close, and yet so far. All that we can do, like Jesus’ mother, is simply to behold it.

Resisting every temptation to turn away, moreover, we choose by faith to be present to it, as painful as that may be. We remain, knowing that their path of suffering has no clear end. We know also that love remains.

It all seems so senseless to us, however, watching them suffer in this way, and we stand there, armless like Mary, knowing that the way to healing is through the suffering, not despite it, that God’s grace lies in the suffering, not beyond it. We know that this is true in our head, but it hurts the heart all the same.

As we head into Holy Week, I imagine that we’ll have many opportunities to journey with each other through the passion of the Christ. But if you’re looking for a resource to help you journey more meaningfully, perhaps also more imaginatively, through it, allow me to recommend to you a Stations exhibit that pairs a liturgy that I created with the work of the African-American artist, Laura James.

I partnered with my diocese on this project; you can view it here and you can listen here to a conversation between myself and Laura.

Laura James, “Station IV: Jesus Meets his Afflicted Mother” (2006).