Walking the Stations

In a time when Catholic piety is often fixed on the Good Friday "stations of the cross," and evangelical piety is associated with an imaginary "what would Jesus do," and much of Protestant religion has slimmed Jesus down from the fully dimensioned Christology of the Gospels, and contemporary Christianity misses a Christ who has "moved into the neighborhood" (John 1:14) and fully engaged the world and its peoples, and touring liberals tout how little a Christian actually needs to believe, this book chooses fourteen episodes from Jesus' entire life and makes them "way stations" on a pilgrimage on which we gather to meet Jesus in person, share him in community, and follow him to a fully realized discipleship. Such way stations may recall the medieval imitation of Christ or the notion of a Christian pilgrimage during which we "make the way by walking." Historically, pilgrimage is meant to evoke "I want to be in that number." Yet identifying these stations is fully congruent with contemporary New Testament scholarship, whether liberal or historically orthodox. The significance of this book is that it sets forth a process of adult Christian education today that is rich with all the dimensions of Jesus' life, from birth to death and resurrection, with all the happenings in between. And most important, it turns adult Christian education into a compelling Bible study in community, and one that attracts participation like walking a labyrinth. Through such engagement it recovers for lively practice today the mostly forgotten medieval imitatio Christi and inserts this into the nearly forgotten but once vividly realized practice of pilgrimage, overdue today as a way of imprinting the Christian walk onto the culture and onto individual believers and their communities. Finally, it follows contemporary Gospel scholarship back to the historical Jesus, through visionary Holy Land tours or a modern walking the way stations that constitute Jesus' own life and our immersion in it that would constitute true discipleship.