The monks at St. Isaac of Syria post a dazzling array of Resurrection icons. And they’re more than virtual. You can buy mounted prints for your home.

The most awesome Holy Saturday homily comes to us (we think) from Epiphanius of Cyprus.

Something strange is happening … there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” . . .

You can read the rest by clicking here.

The Way of the Cross is the inevitable way of a Christian’s heart.

Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the Catholic Church without the devotion that goes by that name.

It goes by other names, too: “The Stations of the Cross,” “Via Crucis,” “Via Dolorosa” — or just “the stations.”

The practice has settled, for several centuries now, into brief meditations on 14 scenes from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

Why are Christians drawn so strongly to this devotion? Because Jesus wanted us to be. “Then He said to all, ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me’” (Lk 9:23).

When Jesus speaks the words “if” or “unless,” Christians listen carefully. For then Our Lord is laying down the conditions of our discipleship — the prerequisites of heaven.

• • • •

The Way of the Cross developed gradually in the life of the Church. In the Roman world, the cross was a “stumbling block” (Gal 5:11). Crucifixion was a most humiliating form of execution: a man was stripped naked and suspended in a public place; he was pelted with rocks and trash and left to suffocate slowly while passersby mocked his agony.

Crucifixion was still a common occurrence during the first three centuries of Christianity, so it was not easy for believers, like St. Paul, to “boast” (Gal 6:14) of the cross. For people who had seen criminals crucified, the cross could not have been an easy thing to love.

Yet love it they did. Devotion to the cross pervades the earliest Christian writings. And the earliest records of pilgrimage show us that Christians endured great hardships — traveling thousands of miles, from France and Spain to Jerusalem — so that they could walk the streets of Jesus’ suffering: the Way of the Cross.

The Jerusalem liturgy of Holy Week memorialized the events of Jesus’ Passion. On Holy Thursday, the bishop led the procession from the Garden of Gethsemane to Calvary. The fourth-century practice is well attested by St. Cyril of Jerusalem and by Egeria, the Bordeaux Pilgrim.

After Christianity was legalized in 313 A.D., pilgrims regularly thronged Jerusalem. The Way of the Cross became one of the standard routes for pilgrims and tourists. It wound its way through narrow streets, from the site of Pilate’s Praetorium to the summit of Calvary to the sepulcher where Jesus was laid to rest.

How did they know the sites of these events? One ancient story holds that the Virgin Mary continued to visit those places, every day for the rest of her life. Surely, the apostles and the first generation would hold dear the memories of Jesus’ passion and pass them on.

Very likely, the route emerged from the oral history of Palestinian Christians and from the ambitious archeological excavations of the devout empress Helena. Along the way, pilgrims and guides paused at several places traditionally associated with biblical scenes — such as Jesus’ conversation with the women of Jerusalem (Lk 23:27-31) — as well as some scenes not recorded in the Bible. These occasional pauses were known in Latin as stationes. By the eighth century, they were a standard part of the Jerusalem pilgrimage.

Such pilgrimages grew in popularity well into the age of the crusaders. Gradually, the stations became more developed. In fact, history records many different series, varying in number, content and form.

In 1342, the Church entrusted the Franciscan order with the care of the holy sites, and it was these friars who most ardently promoted the praying of the Way of the Cross. Around this time, the Popes began to grant indulgences to anyone who devoutly prayed the stations in Jerusalem. Also at this time, the Franciscans began to spread the Marian hymn that would eventually be most closely associated with the devotion: the Latin Stabat Mater, familiarly rendered in English beginning with the words:

At the cross, her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.

The lyric is attributed to a Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi, who died in 1306.

European pilgrims were so impressed by the Jerusalem tour that they took the Way home with them. Around the fifteenth century, they began to build symbolic replicas of the stations, in the churches and monasteries of their homelands. Eight stations had been standard in Jerusalem, but these expanded to as many as 37 in Europe.

The practice became enormously popular. Now everyone — small children, the poor, the infirm — could make their spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the Way of the Cross. In a tangible way, they could take up their cross — just as Jesus had commanded — and follow Him to the end.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Stations of the Cross, now settled at 14, were considered almost standard equipment in a church building. Some were elaborate — dramatic, life-sized wood carvings of the human figures. Others were mere roman numerals — I through XIV — carved into the church wall at intervals. The Popes extended the indulgences customary for Jerusalem pilgrims to Christians everywhere, if they prayed the stations in their own churches in the prescribed way.

The stations continued to be associated with the Franciscan order, and Church law often required that stations be installed (or at least blessed) by a Franciscan priest.

• • • • 

“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Jesus said this to “all,” to every Christian. In the earliest days of the Church, it was perhaps easier to know the gravity of His command. The cross was not yet a symbol. It was a horror that took place, with some frequency, at the edges of town. It was the worst death they could imagine, devised by people who possessed a certain genius for torture.

When Christianity became the official religion of the empire, crucifixion was outlawed. Over time, the most basic Christian devotion — devotion to the cross of Jesus — began to require an act of imagination.

Today, our need is greater still. For we have sanitized even ordinary death: shutting it up in hospitals, silencing its agonies with drugs. The shame, the gore, and the stench — the commonplaces of public executions — have become incomprehensible. This is the cost of our everyday sins, and yet it is a sum, like the national debt, that is so remote from us that we cannot get worked up over it.

If we pray the Way of the cross, we cannot help but get worked up. Through the stations, we draw near, in our hearts and minds, our intellect and will and imagination, to the scenes beheld by our ancestors. We see a a young man scourged with coarse leather whips studded with shards of pottery. His bleeding shoulders, with every nerve raw and exposed, receive a rough wooden beam, heavy enough to hold a man’s dead weight. He totters under the weight amid a jeering crowd. Delirious, He weaves along the cobblestones and stumbles, now crushed downward by the wood on His shoulders. His fall gives him no rest, as the crowd mocks Him by kicking Him, stepping on His raw wounds, spitting in His face. He will fall again and again. When at last He reaches His destination, His torturers pierce the nerves in His hands with nails, affixing Him to the crossbeam, and then raise Him up, placing the beam atop another, thicker beam set perpendicular to the ground. His weakened torso slumps forward, compressing His diaphragm, making it impossible for Him to breathe. To take a breath, He must push up on the nail in His feet or pull up on the nails that pierce His arms. Every breath will cost Him an extremity of pain, until He succumbs to shock or suffocation or blood loss.

This is the hard part of Christianity: our faith cannot exist apart from devotion to the cross. Our ancestors longed to touch the relics of the true cross. Even our separated brethren love to survey the the old rugged cross.

It all seems unbearable. But Christ has borne it, and He insisted that we must, too. We cannot be lifted up to heaven except by way of the cross. Tradition has mapped out the way for us.

• • • • 

The Stations of the Cross
in their most popular form

1. Jesus is condemned to death;
2. the cross is laid upon him;
3. Jesus’ first fall;
4. Jesus meets His Mother, Mary;
5. Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross;
6. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus;
7. Jesus’ second fall;
8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem;
9. Jesus’ third fall;
10. Jesus is stripped of His garments;
11. the crucifixion;
12. Jesus dies on the cross;
13. His body is taken down from the cross;
14. Jesus is laid in the tomb.

Among English-speakers, the vocal prayers take this or some similar shape:

1. Recitation of the name and number of the station, for example: “The third station, Jesus falls for the first time.”

2. “We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You!
Because by Your holy cross You have redeemed the world.”

3. Reading of a brief meditation.

4. Recitation of an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be.

5. Singing of a verse of the Stabat Mater.

Meditations on the Stations
Many great Catholics have written meditations on the Way of the Cross. I recommend those by the following authors. All can be fairly easily found on the Web:

St. Alphonsus Liguori
Ven. John Henry Newman
Father Romano Guardini
St. Josemaria Escriva
Mother Angelica
Pope John Paul II

I’m trying to track down the earliest literary reference to the “miracle of the spring” attributed to St. Peter during his stay in the Tullianum, the dungeon of what’s now known as the Mamertine. I can’t find anything earlier than the Middle Ages. But the scene appears often in early-Christian art. Anyone out there know a text in the Fathers or the Christian apocrypha?

St. Melito of Sardis is a Father worth getting to know during Holy Week. It’s a particular privilege of our time that we can get to know him. Most of his words were lost for most of Christian history. Only in the mid-twentieth century was an almost-complete text of Melito found. The rediscovered text was titled Peri Pascha — which means both “On Passover” and “On Easter,” since in the ancient languages both holidays share the same name. Melito shows us the Old Testament foreshadowing of the Christian Easter in Israel’s exodus from Egypt.

Preached around 175 A.D., Peri Pascha is the work of a man steeped in the history of Israel. Some modern readers have misunderstood and condemned Melito as anti-Jewish. One scholar I revere even referred to him as the “first poet of deicide.” But surely these accusations would have stunned and horrified Melito himself. For it is likely that he was himself a convert from Judaism. He was, in any event, a profound student of the Hebrew Scriptures, and even traveled to Palestine to study them on their home turf.

He lived in a time when rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity presented two different, newly emerging responses to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D. It was a time of crisis. Both the ancient rabbis and the Church Fathers saw their respective traditions as a continuation of the tradition and history of Israel. Both the rabbis and the Fathers recognized that the old order was giving way to something new. Where Christians and Jews differed was on the nature and form of the new order.

Judge for yourself. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, numbers 128 and 130 (online here). Then go on to read Melito’s Peri Pascha. You might also read Todd Russell Hanneken’s provocative essay “A Completely Different Reading of Melito’s Peri Pascha.”

The great Robert Louis Wilken tells us that we can learn from the Fathers how to build a Christian culture on the foundations (or rubble) of a pagan one. It’s been done before. “Amo, Amas, Amat: Christianity and Culture” was delivered as the Palmer Lecture at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ. If you haven’t read Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, please do. You’ll find my effusive review of it here.

I apologize for the double-posting of this information. I accidentally deleted the old posting. Newbie.

Kevin Edgecomb at Biblicalia, the Bombaxo blog, just posted a remarkable passage from John Chryssavgis’s book The Way of the Fathers (a book I have not read). The post ends with this lovely line: “To become famili-arized with the Church Fathers and Mothers is to belong to the same family (cf. Matt. 12:49-50) in our own culture and age.” Read the whole thing.

The world has never known comfort as we know it today. Millions of us have grown used to luxuries that the ancient emperors never dreamed of, and we’ve come to consider them necessities: motor travel, aspirin, and a warm shower, to name just three.

Compare these to the ordinary miseries endured by citizens in the ancient world. Most lived in cramped, smoky tenements with no ventilation or plumbing. If one of those rooms caught fire, the blaze could consume whole city blocks in minutes; and this was a fairly regular event.

Life expectancy was around 30 for men and lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease, and disease often left its victims disfigured or dead. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by pests. The bodies of the dead were often left to rot in the town sewer, which usually ran down the middle of the street.

Ancient sources say that the stench from a city could usually be detected from miles away. And country life was worse.

This was the world of the early Christians, the Fathers of the Church, and yet they are as joyful a group as you’ll ever meet. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar described the Fathers in this way: “Greatness, depth, boldness, flexibility, certainty, and a flaming love — the virtues of youth are marks of patristic theology.”

Those words do not describe most of us on days when we’re troubled by a hangnail, a malfunctioning air conditioner, or a high pollen count.

Yet Balthasar’s description, as a general statement, is all the more amazing when you consider the discomforts our Fathers faced every day — not to mention their mortal peril from persecution.

Then as now, happiness depended more on a person’s disposition than on his circumstances. What was it that filled the Fathers with such constant joy? “I greet you in the blood of Jesus Christ,” said St. Ignatius Antioch, “which is eternal and abiding joy.”

Jesus’ blood — poured out in His suffering and self-giving, poured out in baptism, poured out in the Mass — was the source of the early Church’s joy. Christians shared His blood and His body, and so they didn’t worry so much about indulging the limitless hungers of their own sensuality. Remarkably, though they suffered extreme deprivation, they exhorted one another to still-greater fasting, so that they might live more perfectly the life of Jesus Christ, sharing in the cross of Christ, His outpouring of love.

They knew something that we perhaps have forgotten. Though they had few comforts in life, they knew they were destined to lose even the few they had.

We should take heed. If we feed our every desire and indulge our every habit as a need and a right, then our losses will leave us bitter and estranged from God. Time, age, illness and “doctor’s orders” can take away our taste for chocolate, our ability to enjoy a cold beer and even the intimate embrace of a loved one. Only the blood of Christ is everlasting joy. “And what else is it to live happily,” said St. Augustine, “except to know that one has something eternally.”

The Fathers were ready to leave everything behind, and do it joyfully. Even today we meet Christians who are able to remain serene amid extreme suffering and even when facing death. It’s not just a matter of temperament. It is the coursing of the blood of Christ, shed for them, the blood of Christ that they’ve taken as their own life’s blood, even as their earthly life drains away.

Like their Fathers in faith, they’ve tasted from the fountain of eternal youth, and that’s all they need to live joyfully amid difficulties.

Today, the media map out many paths to joy. The shelves of the bookstore promise much in The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Sex, and even The Joy of Linux. The soda machine near my house boasts “The Joy of Cola.” But all joys that pass are false. All joys that pass leave us in sadness, unless they, like the everyday lives of the Fathers and martyrs, are washed in the blood of the Lamb.

My son tells me that the audio files should work for you now. Thanks to all of you who emailed to let me know they were unintelligible. (That’s actually a step up for me.)

Oxonian Kyle Potter, aka Captain Sacrament, has entirely too much fun with those who attempt a low-church reading of the Fathers.

Bob Jones University keeps a collection of sacred icons. Who knew?

Some years ago I had a desperate need for St. Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John. It’s among his most frequently cited works, but it’s extremely hard to find. As far as I know, there’s been only one edition in English, published in the Oxford Library of the Fathers series in 1870s and ’80s. Few copies survive, and those that do are usually kept in the inaccessible, protected vaults of university and monastery libraries. But I finally finagled a copy through interlibrary loan — and it arrived with its pages still uncut! It’s spine was brittle and papers crumbling, but it had never been opened, never been read, in more than a century of life on a library shelf. It took an entire day, but I managed to cut the papers and photocopy both enormous volumes without destroying them. I read the commentary hungrily, and I still go back to it often. Cyril is an Alexandrian somewhat allergic to allegory, yet keen to examine the types of Christ in the Old Testament. His is a theological exegesis, and he pays special mind to the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the divinization of man.

I’m thrilled today to note that volume 2 of the Commentary is now available online at The Tertullian Project’s own library of the Early Church Fathers. TTP is a knockout of a site for the Tertullian-obsessed, but it is also home to transcriptions of rare editions of Origen, Eusebius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Pseudo-Dionysius, not to mention many lesser-known ecclesiastical writers — and the most notorious of the anti-Christian writers, like Porphyry and Julian. While there are countless online transcriptions of the famous Edinburgh edition of the Fathers — and in endless varieties of format — The Tertullian Project has turned its attention to the older series, the unusual series, and the odd translations and studies that were not part of any series.

Where I live, it’s a cold, gloomy, rainy day today — a perfect day to spend browsing The Tertullian Project. But even if you spend a sunny day on this site, it’ll be a day well spent.

Thanks to Michael Barber at Singing in the Reign for restoring Judas Iscariot’s good ol’ bad reputation. The so-called Gospel of Judas appeals to anti-Christian impulses because it promises a complete reversal, an overturning of Christian faith and values. It calls good evil and evil good. It makes a joke of the Mass, while it turns history’s greatest villain into a sainted pope and evangelist. Michael Barber, though, turns it all right-side up again, as he explains the Old Testament background to the New Testament’s Passion story.

Michael is a great young scholar, a doctoral student at Fuller, with a remarkable command of the ancient languages. But he writes like the best journalists, so ordinary folks can understand — and make use of — his arguments. He is a teacher of the first rank. You can tell that by listening to his tapes or reading either of his two books, on the Psalms and on the Book of Revelation. They’re all available on his blog, as are his three excellent posts on the Gospel of Judas. Don’t miss them.

Rick Brannan, an Evangelical, is just starting a blog-study of the Didache, the first-century Christian manual of discipline and liturgy. It looks promising. A little familiarity with Greek will help, but it’s not necessary, as Rick is providing line-by-line translation.

I like the fact that Rick provides a guide to pronouncing the title. Our St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology promotes a book in the Didache catechetical series, and people don’t know quite what to do with the name. Often they reach back into high-school French and ask about “the Di-DAWSH series.”

Will you have escargot with that?

Remember the excitement you felt when you first found the works of the Fathers? Relive those days with Deacon Alex Jones, in his memoir of discovery, No Price Too High. Jones was a Pentecostal pastor when he started reading the Apostolic Fathers. These men, so clearly living in continuity with the Apostles, made him long for continuity with them — communion, actually, and of a sacramental sort. The book’s hard to put down. And, never mind the title, it’s really quite affordable!