The soldiers led Jesus away into the courtyard of the palace known as the governor’s headquarters,[a] and they called together the whole company of soldiers. 17 They dressed him up in a purple robe and twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on him. 18 They saluted him, “Hey! King of the Jews!” 19 Again and again, they struck his head with a stick. They spit on him and knelt before him to honor him. 20 When they finished mocking him, they stripped him of the purple robe and put his own clothes back on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.
21 Simon, a man from Cyrene, Alexander and Rufus’ father, was coming in from the countryside. They forced him to carry his cross.
22 They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha, which means Skull Place. 23 They tried to give him wine mixed with myrrh, but he didn’t take it. 24 They crucified him. They divided up his clothes, drawing lots for them to determine who would take what. 25 It was nine in the morning when they crucified him. (Common English Bible)
“We Were There: Lenten Edition,” Week Three
I am more than just my hometown, you know.
I am a father as well. My sons, Alexander and Rufus—I am proud of them. I love them.
We came here, to Jerusalem, my sons and I, all the way from Cyrene in Libya for the Passover. It was right for us to do so because Israel is where my family is from, going back hundreds of years, before Alexander the Great’s general Ptolemy I Soter forced my ancestors to resettle in Cyrene.
In Greek, “Soter” means “the Savior.” What an absolute crock. He was many things, never a savior.
For hundreds of years, my people have been their own saviors, surviving in diaspora, in a land not our own, forced upon us by our Greek and now Roman overlords. Yet its name is attached to mine.
Because they never miss an opportunity to remind us of that history. Like when they pulled me out of the crowd and forced me to carry this Galilean man’s crossbeam. A man I would not have known from Adam, and now I am expected by our occupiers to play a part in his execution.
On the road, I overhear them refer to the Galilean by name. Jesus, they call Him. Jesus of Nazareth.
Can anything good come from Nazareth, I ask myself as I heft the crossbeam further. I sure hope so. Because this cross I have been forced to bear…the memory of it will not soon fade for me. I will remember how this feels. And my sons will remember the image of their father carrying the cross. I need to believe that some good can come from this, but I know not how or why, and it haunts me.
For this Jesus of Nazareth, the Via Dolorosa was but a short while, lasting from the prefect’s chair in Jerusalem to Calvary. But for me, it will endure all the way from Jerusalem back to Cyrene.
This is a sermon series I am excited for in our first Lenten season together. Across the board, feedback concerning Valley’s Advent devotional series, We Were There, was overwhelmingly positive, especially for the first-person voice it was composed in by its many contributors. Buoyed by this feedback, Dr. Lola Kiser and I crafted a similar focus for both our upcoming Holy Week devotional book and this sermon series as a way to lead up to that devotional. This means that each Sunday through Lent, all the way up to Easter Sunday, my message will begin in the first-person, through the eyes of someone who would have experienced Holy Week, just as we did with Advent last year. We began this series two weeks with Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead earlier in John 11, and we continued pretty much straight on, verse-by-verse, in John 11 to arrive at the high priest Caiaphas. Today, we switch over to Mark’s Gospel to hear—fleetingly—of Simon of Cyrene.
Simon of Cyrene is a man we know little about—Mark 15:21 pretty much sums up the totality of our knowledge of this cipher whom Roman legionnaires picked out of the assembled people to carry Jesus’s crossbeam when the Son of God began to falter after His torture on the route to Golgotha. The crossbeam was the piece of the cross that ran parallel to the ground. Contrary to popular depictions, Jesus would not have carried the entirety of the cross to Calvary—the vertical post that ran perpendicular to the ground would have been a semi-permanent fixture, used for multiple victims of crucifixion, with a new crossbeam attached to the post for each execution.
Still, the crossbeam would have been onerous, likely weighing somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds, and it is easy to see how, even without the flogging Jesus had already endured, victims of crucifixion would not have been able to carry their own crossbeams the entire way to the hills outside Jerusalem where crucifixions would have been held in order to maximize their visibility.
So what Simon of Cyrene experiences, in being forced at bladepoint to carry the Messiah’s crossbeam, should not be understood by us to be a one-off. The impressing of random passersby to carry crossbeams was very probably not an uncommon occurrence.
We know Simon’s name. We do not know the names of all the others forced into this macabre act of forced service. Simon’s name must stand in for them.
Simon’s name also bears his roots of place and home. Just as we say “Jesus of Nazareth,” we say “Simon of Cyrene,” though Cyrene’s reputation was potentially better in ancient times than Nazareth’s was. Cyrene was an academic hub for Greek philosophy, and benefited from its association with Socratic philosophy imported by one of Socrates’s own pupils, Aristippus.
I do not know if a reputation academic excellence by itself would have made Simon proud to be known as “of Cyrene,” especially given the circumstances of Ptolemy I Soter’s expulsion of Israelite to Cyrene to begin with. It may have—as I said, we really know very little about the man himself.
But the way in which we know him ought to beg of us that same question of what pride we can, or should take, in being known by our own home communities. If, instead of my Atcheson surname, I were known as Eric of Valley, what do you imagine other people would think of that name? Would it be positive or negative? Or would they not think anything at all?
Our surnames certainly have that effect of invocation—famous familial names like Kennedy, King, Graham, or Ali, you know the name when you hear it, and it can evoke all sorts of history, memories, and legacies.
But how would that effect change if our communities were also attached to our names? What thoughts and memories would people associate with our names if we add “of Valley,” or “of Birmingham,” or “of Alabama,” or even “of America” to our names?
What might people hear by each of those? What would we like about what people may hear? What might we not like and desperately wish we could change? What might we not like and have it within our power to help change?
Lets start at the most local—pretend that “of Valley” is appended to your name. Imagine introducing yourself that way. Would people have an association formed? Some many, but many more would not. So, how do you begin to form that association in a positive, lifegiving manner?
This is no mere thought exercise, because I imagine for many of you, Simon is the only person or thing you associate with the history of the ancient city of Cyrene. I have already told you pretty much all I know about the place except that it was also a hub for the early church, but Simon is by far my strongest spiritual link to it.
You are almost certainly somebody else’s strongest spiritual link to Valley. So, how will you reflect both the totality of yourself and the totality of Valley? Remember, Simon is much more than a name—as Mark notes, he is a father as well, and certainly he had a profession or vocation of some sort, surely some additional family, who knows what else. Yet we know him today by his home.
Other people may not know the entirety of you, just as we do not know anywhere near the entirety of Simon. But if they know that you identify as a Christian, their impression of the Body of Christ can be positively or negatively influenced by you along whatever road you are currently on.
It is a long road we have trod together these past six months, and that y’all have trod before I began. Even though it has been in place (remember sheltering in place?) it has still felt a journey the length of Jerusalem in Israel to Cyrene in Libya. That, too, is a crossbeam impressed upon the shoulders.
And while the focus is on Jesus on Good Friday, it should be worth taking a moment to pause and take in the impact this experience must have had for Simon. Being forced by the occupying empire to take part in an execution against your will—that is not the sort of thing that gets washed out of the short-term memory in a week. It is a memory he will have carried back with him to Cyrene.
We will carry memories of this past year, of what we have sacrificed and given up, of the loved ones we have seen get sick and sometimes die, and that does not leave our short-term memories either. The full fallout, the full traumatic effect of the past year, will take us a long time to take stock of.
I hope that one thing we take away from the weight of the crossbeam is a firm belief in not impressing such heavy crosses on one another. That cannot ever be our place—we are meant to lighten and lift up, not press down upon and lord over. We are traveling servants, not taskmasters.
May we walk back to Cyrene with Simon and his sons. May we serve
and help him on in his path as he served and helped our Savior on His, knowing
that Simon’s salvation from this pain is wrapped up in our own, and ours in
his. His liberation from sin Christ that achieves is wrapped up in ours, and ours in his, because the God who saves us, who liberates us, who desires freedom for each and every one of us, has wished it so.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 7, 2021