In Praise of Incidental Characters

Have you ever noticed the incidental characters that fill the pages of scripture? Characters like Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives who intervened to save the Hebrew boys who were born after Pharaoh’s command to kill them. Or Shallum (about whom the Under the Umbrella group just read this morning) who, along with his daughters, is one of the rebuilders of the Jerusalem wall. Or Eutychus, the young man from Troas, who fell asleep during Paul’s lengthy sermon and fell out of a window. (You can remember his name by remembering “You’dacussed too, if that had been you”) Or Simon of Cyrene, the hapless conscript pulled from the crowd to carry Jesus’ cross.

It’s Simon whose experience with the cross we will consider this Sunday. His involvement along the Via Dolorosa (“The Way of Suffering”) is the fifth of the fourteen Stations of the Cross in the Roman Catholic tradition, so he has become the subject of hundreds of murals, paintings, and sculptures. Many of the renderings of Simon show him with northern European features, although Cyrene is located in what is now Libya. The cross, then, is also born by a foreigner. He is not a missionary volunteer, nor is he a close follower and friend of Jesus. He is a stranger in the crowd. 

Simon of Cyrene was one of the incidental characters in the life of Jesus, and yet his name is remembered for all of eternity. He was a spectator who became a participant, an outsider who became an insider, a sideliner who became a saint. Perhaps the burden of grace will fall upon each of us, as well.

Pastor Ray