Creative Stations of the Cross

This morning at church we worked together (all ages) to create the(biblical) Stations of the Cross.

Three of the stations were mine to plan, and I’m posting here what we did.

My first station was the betrayal and arrest of Jesus. We cut paper into strips, and used crayons to make rubbings of silver coins on the paper, while we talked about Judas’ story, and how he tried to take back what he had done, but the consequences were already happening. We thought about the consequences by making our strips of paper into a chain, representing Jesus as a prisoner. The chain and all its interlinked loops also reminded us that all our actions affect other people, but that we can make that a good thing, not a bad thing, by the way we are with our friends, and with the people we find it hard to get on with- especially when we have things to forgive, or when we need to say sorry.

My next station was Jesus’ trial before Pontius Pilate. Pilate was supposed to be the one responsible for justice, but he didn’t know what to do so he washed his hands as if to say ‘what happens to Jesus is nothing to do with me’. This is how injustice keeps happening, even today.

For this station we cut cross shapes out of sugar paper and wrote on them an issue to do with injustice that we felt strongly about: poverty, bullying, #metoo, racism, prejudice, being blamed for something that’s not your fault… We carefully folded the ‘stalk’ and then the ‘arms’ and then the ‘head’ of the crosses into the middle so we had a little folded square. We looked at how we had hidden the issue that we’d written on the Cross. Then we floated that square in a bowl of water and it opened again, revealing the truth hidden inside. Some of them opened slowly, some quickly. That’s how justice happens: someone dares to speak the truth, so that everyone can see it.

My final station was when Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus carry the cross. I cut the ‘way of the cross’ out of fabric, and everyone made little people out of salt dough. The people were placed on the fabric road, in groups, with a cross for each group so that they could share the burden. We talked a lot about how tired they were, and about who supports us on our life journey – and who we are able to support – especially when life is hard.

You can see some of the other stations on this film that my son made during the morning – he didn’t manage to catch all the Stations but here’s what he managed to photograph, in order. https://youtu.be/Df7LoKS83fI