Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

There’s a lot I’d love to write about relating to our gospel reading from Mark 15 today...like this Charles Williams' meditation on the Cross, or the story of a friend who told me he hated Good Friday services where the Passion was read dramatically, the congregation shouting, “Crucify him!” He said it was horribly rude. I told him that was part of the point of doing it...

But I want to focus on something that could easily escape our attention—it’s the last verse of our reading: “They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus.” The figure of Simon of Cyrene feels so familiar to us…but familiar to us as a sort of bit player or an oxymoronically significant background character—a nobody who was made to do something. We might very well miss, then, how really special it is that the author of the Gospel remembered his name at all.

So here’s what we know of Simon, and it’s nothing particularly remarkable at first glance. He was a passer-by, he was from North Africa, and he was a dad. He was, in other words, completely ordinary. But here’s what the mention of his name tells us: something happened to him when he carried the cross for Jesus that made him a believer; something transformed him from passer-by to an agent of the Gospel, a member of the Jesus community; something laid claim on his ordinariness and used it for the purposes of the Glory, and then didn’t let go of it…such that the Evangelist expects us to know who he’s talking about just by the mention of his name. Simon was known. And, clearly, so were Alexander and Rufus.

We don’t know much more about Simon than this, though there’s something about the passage that suggests (to me at least), that Simon might have been dead when the Gospel was written (we’re supposed to know Simon through our immediate familiarity with his sons).

Nonetheless, there’s a sense in which this passage is here in the Gospel as a kind of explanation as well as a sign of the powerful grace of God. In that light, it might very well read something like this: “Some random guy was forced by the military escort to carry Jesus’ cross. And do you know who that random guy was? No random guy at all: it was Simon! That’s what did it! Did you ever wonder why he was the beacon of love and conduit of blessing that he was? Did you ever wonder what made him so zealous for the welfare of widows and orphans, for the sick and the poor, for the outcast? Did you ever wonder where Alexander and Rufus got it from—their commitment to the Gospel, their witness to God’s love, their own living legacy of faithfulness? Well, they got it from Simon who showed them the power of the cross in his own life, showed them the life of the Crucified One living in his own life. And Simon himself got it from his encounter with Jesus and his cross, from that time his life was changed when he carried the cross for Jesus. What more can we say about Simon? He was an ordinary guy who, by grace’s extraordinary providence, lived a remarkable—which is to say, an ordinary—Christian life. Thanks be to God!”

The remarkableness of an ordinary Christian life! That’s the power of a life made brilliant by the surpassingly radiant and supernal grace of God. That’s the power, in fact, of being open to an encounter with Jesus Christ—an encounter vouchsafed to us in the Eucharist, in the Church, and available, too, in engagement with Scripture, in the beauty of the natural world, in the lives of those around you...

How will you be open to that encounter with Christ today? And how will that encounter find you and transform you, making of you and of your life a living flame of Love?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+