I don't know what the date is, but undoubtedly in the heart of every one of us there is a
date that we remember.
We know what happened, we know where we were, we know what we were wearing, and we know
lots of details about it because something happened that was so traumatic we can never
forget it.
Maybe it was the assassination of John Kennedy or Martin Luther King or John Lennon.
Perhaps it was a loved one or a close friend.
There are some events that are so traumatic, so emotionally shocking, that they leave psychic
effects in our lives for as long as we live on the earth.
During the crucifixion of Jesus Christ were thousands of people.
While most may have been unaware of the fast moving circumstances that took place in the
night time leading to his execution, everyone in Jerusalem eventually was left with this
day being marked on their lives forever.
Just three days later two men were walking from Jerusalem toward their home when a stranger
came to walk beside them.
He inquired what was on their minds and they responded by saying, are you only a visitor
to Jerusalem?
And do not know the things that have happened there in these days?
You see the whole city became wrapped up in this event that took place 2000 years ago.
The series that we're going to focus on on these Sundays before Easter will deal with
a few of those people who are in the periphery of the cross.
These individuals, most of whom were not followers of Jesus before that day, experienced life
change as a result of the cross.
I invite you to open your Bible with me to the New Testament and the Gospel of Mark to
the fifteenth chapter where I begin reading in verse 21.
Mark 15, verse 21.
And a certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing
by on his way in from the country and they forced him to carry the cross.
In the course of life's journey, the cross may intersect your life with results that
will change you.
Consider for example Simon of Cyrene.
Every Jew who had been scattered throughout the Roman Empire of that day in what was called
the Diaspora had a lifelong dream.
That dream was to one day go on a pilgrimage to the city of Jerusalem, to be there in the
holy city for the Passover season.
It was for most of them a religious journey and also a personal holiday.
It was a festive occasion.
It was expensive.
It was time consuming.
It required planning and so there was a lot of anticipation of this time when one would
finally be able to go to Jerusalem.
Simon lived in the city of Cyrene.
It was an old Greek settlement on the northern coast of Africa in what was called in that
day and still is called today Libya.
Cyrene was a prosperous city of trade and commerce and it had a large Jewish population.
Although Simon was from Africa, it is unlikely that he was an African black.
His name suggests to us that Simon was a transplanted Jew who may have been part of that commercial
center of Cyrene.
Perhaps he booked passage on a ship from Cyrene to Joppa or to Caesarea.
He joined himself to a caravan of camels and horses that went across the top of northern
Africa and Egypt over to the land of Palestine.
But eventually, like thousands of other visitors to Jerusalem in that season, he probably had
to stay in the fields or the vineyards around the city.
There were a few inns in Jerusalem.
They were not places where respectable people tended to stay.
Nonetheless, they were quickly filled up when this season of the year arrived.
So camps were set up all around the city to care for the literally tens of thousands of
people who would come from all over the Roman Empire for the Passover.
In that throng somewhere around the city of Jerusalem was Simon and with him his two sons,
Rufus and Alexander, and probably Mrs. Simon.
His wife was likely along with them.
Alexander and Rufus are named by Mark for a reason most commentators think.
It is a suggestion to us that these two boys became well known in the Christian community.
Mark wrote his gospel probably to Christians who were in Rome.
The story is that Peter preached in Rome and the Christians there desired someone to set
down for them in order the events of Jesus' life.
Mark, John Mark being associated with both Paul and Barnabas and Peter eventually, was
asked to take upon himself that assignment of writing this gospel.
And so sometime between 67 AD and 70 AD he set down and penned the sixteen chapters in
the gospel of Mark.
He mentions Rufus and Alexander specifically probably because the Christians in Rome knew
them.
If so, this ties together with why Paul in the sixteenth chapter of Romans writing to
the same people says to them,
Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother in mine.
And so Rufus is named, assuming it is the same Rufus, he is named again by the Apostle
Paul and is living in Rome.
Paul sends him greetings, chosen in the Lord, and also greets his mother who apparently
had had a special ministry in the life of the Apostle Paul as he calls her not only
Rufus' mother but his own.
Then the question might be asked, well why isn't Simon also mentioned if this is that
Rufus?
And the answer is that he may have died by this time.
Mark is writing some thirty years later and so was Paul and so Simon may well have died
after the events that we read about in this chapter.
And why isn't Alexander mentioned?
Well it's possible again that he may have died and it's possible that he was buried
in the city of Jerusalem.
In 1941 an article written by archaeologists who were digging in Palestine recorded uncovering
a cave on the southwest side of the valley of Kidron.
The valley is on the east of Jerusalem and comes around to the south.
And the cave was marked as a burial place for Jews from Cyrene.
And so it seems that there were particular plots set aside in Jerusalem for Jews who
died in the city from various parts of the Roman Empire and here was a cave for the bodies
of those who were from Cyrene.
And in that cave they found an ossuary.
They say, well what is that?
It is a bone box to put it simply.
It is a box made out of limestone or some other kind of stone that can be carved.
And in that box are placed the bones of people.
And they found an ossuary there that twice had written on it in Greek, Alexander the
son of Simon.
And so we think that Alexander died and was buried in the city of Jerusalem, his father
also probably having died in some course.
And now Mark as he writes to the believers in Rome reminds them that this is the Simon
who was the father of both Alexander and Rufus.
Well the morning came for the Passover.
The custom was to have prayers in the temple about nine o'clock and so the pilgrims that
were camped outside of the city came streaming in to Jerusalem through the gates in order
to be in the temple area when the prayers were said at nine o'clock.
But this was a different morning than any morning that had ever occurred before in any
Passover.
As Simon and some of the pilgrims were coming into the city gate, coming out the gate was
a procession of Roman soldiers.
There was a crowd, a mob behind them crying, crucify him.
There was a group of women from Jerusalem following along weeping and there in the midst
of the soldiers were three criminals, each of them bearing his cross.
The cross that was born was what was called a patibulum.
It was that cross piece.
Only the stake was left in place at the place of execution.
It was left in the ground and only the cross beam, the patibulum, was born by the one to
be executed.
And it was born for a reason.
The soldiers wanted to humiliate the condemned criminal so that from the place of judgment
to the place outside the city where he was to be executed, he had to carry his own patibulum
on his shoulders.
Jesus had been through a night without rest, passed from one false trial to another mockery
of a trial.
He was beaten.
He was mocked.
He was cruelly scourged so that when one looked at him one could hardly tell that this was
a human being.
Tremendous emaciation in his body, his loss of blood to this point caused him to be able
to carry his patibulum from the praetorium where he had been judged through the city
streets out to the city gate where apparently he must have stumbled, though the text doesn't
specifically say that.
The Roman soldiers saw the situation.
They did not want him to die before they got him to the crucifixion.
And so they used their powers and pressed into service someone who was standing around
and who should be chosen.
But this man who had for years looked forward to this time in Jerusalem where he could observe
the Passover.
It was a holiday, a vacation for him and his family.
All he wanted to do was to go into the city and go to the temple and pray as the devoted
religious man that he was.
And now he is stopped beside the gate as these soldiers come out and one of the soldiers
grabs him and forces him to come over to them.
And they take that patibulum that had been strapped on the shoulders of Jesus and they
strap it on the shoulders of Simon.
And they say, come on!
I remind you that Simon was not a friend of Jesus.
We don't know he had ever heard of Jesus before.
He did not carry this cross willingly.
It was humiliating.
It was embarrassing.
He was torn away from his boys and his wife and forced to go with this throng of soldiers
and these condemned criminals to a place of execution.
And he, this Jew, this righteous Jew, had to carry a patibulum on his shoulders.
It was a day that Simon would never forget because it was a day when the cross of Jesus
intersected with his life and it changed him forever.
All of the indications suggest that sometime subsequent to that fateful morning, he realized
who Jesus was and came to faith in him along with all of his family.
Warren Wiersbie writes, Simon came to Jerusalem for the Passover and met the Lamb of God.
In this account, so brief as it is from the Gospels, there are several observations I
want to make that apply to our lives this morning.
The first observation is this, we cannot anticipate when our paths too will intersect with God's
interruptions.
Simon was just doing what he had came to the city for.
He had looked forward to this day perhaps for years.
He had invested lots of money to get there.
He was with his family.
He was going to pray to God and his life was interrupted by a cross.
I am speaking this morning to someone whose life has been laid out before you and there
has been a routine that you have been in or there are plans that you have made or there
are goals that you have established or there are intentions that have been in your heart
and suddenly something has come in to interrupt.
That something has been sent by God.
In this regard, I think of Saul of Tarsus who was on his way to Damascus, Syria, there
to continue his work of putting to death and persecuting Christians, followers of this Jesus.
And as he was walking or riding along the road to Damascus, suddenly his life was interrupted
and forever changed.
In the case of Simon, it seems to have resulted in his salvation.
I don't know what the interruption is in your life that God has sent, but it very well
could be that God has sent that interruption to get your attention.
That you might respond to him and be saved.
It is so easy to get caught up in life and in our plans and our routine of things and
to forget about those things that are most important, to neglect our own souls welfare.
And so God plans these interruptions.
And that interruption to you is as the cross was to Simon of Cyrene.
What looked like a humiliating catastrophe for him in the end proved to be a wonderful
opportunity.
And I want you to know that if your routine has been interrupted by God, even if that
interruption is painful, if it brings you to faith in Jesus Christ and to the salvation
of your soul, what now appears to be a catastrophe will be a wonderful opportunity for you to
know God personally through Jesus Christ.
We can't anticipate when these things are going to happen, but God has done it to someone
here I'm talking to today.
And you know who you are, and God knows who you are.
And you know these interruptions don't stop with that first one.
God has a way of stepping into our lives often, and we don't anticipate it.
We're unsuspecting as Simon was.
We're going about our thing, even serving the Lord, even going to the temple, and God
steps into our lives with something special.
When you and I begin to realize that God does this, it makes life an adventure with God.
This happened to me about three weeks ago.
I was out in California over a weekend and attended a church I'd never been to before,
but pastored by a long-time friend of mine in El Cajon, California.
They had just built a brand new church, and I wanted to see it, and I wanted to see my
friend.
And so Pastor Thoman, who was along with me, and I decided we would go there on Sunday
morning to worship at Shadow Mountain Community Church.
We originally had planned to go to the later service because my friend said that would
be the more alive service.
I would have given somebody the same advice if they're coming to our church.
Come to the 1045 service.
People are awake by then, for the most part.
So we decided we needed to go at nine o'clock so we could do some other things that day,
and changed our plans, went to the nine o'clock service, enjoyed it immensely.
And at the conclusion of the service, my pastor friend invited me to come up to the pulpit
and to pronounce the benediction, which I did.
And then I stepped down, and when I did, there was a small group of people there.
And the Wilson's son was there to say hello to me.
He goes to that church.
There were some other people who know some of you who were there who said, well, I know
of Grace Church, and someone who'd even been here.
Then there was this couple.
And as I worked over toward them, they said, you don't recognize us, do you?
And I looked at them again, and they said, we're the Erdelys.
I said, Warren, the Affirm.
Some of you know that my father died when I was eight years of age.
When he was fighting in World War II, his best friend was Warren.
They served together in the Aleutian Islands.
They were together in several army camps in the United States, and the two wives traveled
back and forth across the country from South Carolina to California, trying to keep up
with their husbands and have opportunities to say hello.
When I was a little boy, I remember Warren and his wife coming to visit us in our home
occasionally, and we going to see them as that friendship continued.
Even after my father's sudden death, they kept in touch.
Warren would come down to our farm from St. Joseph, Missouri, where he lived, and would
hunt.
Time went on, and I, as a young man growing up, sort of lost touch with them.
But back in 1966, when I must have been five or six years old, something like that, no,
when in truth I was a senior, had just graduated, in fact, from Moody Bible Institute, I was
traveling with a quartet on a summer tour.
We got to Southern California, and I knew that Warren and Leah Fern lived there, and
so I got their telephone number from my mother and called them up and asked them to come
over to our concert.
I wanted to talk with them.
I wanted to talk with Warren, who I knew was a Christian, about how he had had the opportunity
to witness to my father, or if he had, and sadly he hadn't.
But we renewed acquaintance, and I had not seen them from 1966 until 1993.
From that morning, they had just happened to be visiting from Boise, Idaho, with their
daughter and son-in-law, who happened to go to that church, and they decided to go to
the nine o'clock service.
And we worshiped together in that service, not knowing we were in the same service, until
just at the end I was asked to come and lead in prayer, and they both shocked, looked at
each other, and said, could that be the Galen Call we know?
And they came up afterward, and our acquaintance was renewed.
It was a wonderful, warm occasion.
And walking away from it, I just said, Lord, thank you.
This was a time when you interrupted.
I was here to go to church, and then we have some other things to do, and God just said,
plop, I have a surprise for you.
You and I begin to see life this way, with God in control.
Life becomes an adventure with God, and we enjoy His interruptions, even those that are
painful.
We can't anticipate when our life's journey is going to be interrupted by God and the cross
of Jesus.
The second observation that I make is that unpleasant assignments can be transformed
into unimaginable privileges.
Believe me, if there was any way for Simon to have avoided this, he would have.
He would have come later in the morning, he would have gone earlier, he would have stepped
back in the crowd.
He did not want to carry this cross.
It was an unpleasant assignment, but it was his.
But later, at some time, when he was able to inquire about this one whose cross he bore,
and he found out that it was Jesus of Nazareth, and who He was, and what He had done for Him,
Simon saw that unpleasant task as an unimaginable privilege.
What made the difference?
It was his understanding that God had controlled that assignment he received.
I'm talking to some people today who have some unpleasant assignments in life.
There are things that you're being called upon to do right now that go against your
grain.
It's against your nature.
You find it hard to do these things.
You weren't cut out for that work, that assignment that you're called upon to bear.
You hadn't anticipated this in your life.
When you said your vows, it was for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, not thinking
it might be for poorer or sickness.
My friend, the most unpleasant task in all the world can be transformed into unimaginable
privilege when we understand who it is that hands out the assignments.
It's God.
God is bigger than everything.
God is over all, and He is the one who ultimately hands out the assignments of life.
When you and I can see that and when we can look up into the face of God and say, God,
thank you, suddenly that assignment becomes a privilege.
What was unpleasant and hard becomes an unimagined benefit to our lives.
The third observation I make in our text is that bearing Christ's cross marks us forever.
You and I can never be the same after being confronted with the cross and bearing it.
In Simon's case, it appears that his conversion resulted.
His name is forever written down in the Lamb's Book of Life, and more than that, whenever
this Gospel story is preached around the world, Simon of Cyrene's name is identified with
it.
Bearing the cross of Christ marks us forever.
No one can identify with Him and remain the same or would want to.
How has your life been marked by the cross, my friend?
Thank God for that marking.
Thank God for that hurt.
Thank God for that scar that says that you are one of His and you have borne His cross
faithfully in the world.
The cross of Jesus confronts each of us.
We cannot escape it any more than Simon could.
We may be prepared for it or we may be entirely unsuspecting of it as Simon was, but the fact
is that when the cross presses itself upon us, it demands some kind of response.
We must make a choice to identify with that cross, to pick it up and to carry it, and
to be identified with Jesus or to refuse it.
Thomas Achempas, a Christian priest and mystic who lived more than 500 years ago, said, Jesus
hath many lovers of His kingdom, but few bearers of the cross.
We enjoy identifying with Jesus' kingdom and His reign and the joys of being a Christian,
but where are those who would bear His cross?
All are disposed, writes Thomas, to rejoice with Him, but few to suffer for His sake.
Are you willing to suffer for the sake of Jesus on your high school campus?
Are you willing to bear the cross in your workplace?
Are you willing to identify with Jesus in that public forum?
Jesus hath many lovers of His kingdom, but few bearers of His cross.
One of my favorite authors is Max Lucado.
One of his volumes is entitled, No Wonder They Called Him Savior.
In the introduction of it, Max tells about an occasion several years ago when he was
in Canada preaching and there met a Canadian student from Ireland originally.
The student realized that Max was a Christian and asked for some time with him alone, and
so they got together and sat down with a cup of coffee.
With his deep Irish brogue, the student said, I just want to know what counts.
Don't talk to me of religion.
I've been down that road and please stay off theology.
I have a degree in that.
Get to the heart of it, okay?
I want to know what counts.
They began to stir their coffee and the student went on.
I grew up in the church.
I wanted to go into the ministry.
I took all the courses, the theology, the languages, the exegesis, but I quit.
Something just didn't click.
It's in there somewhere and at least I think it is.
Max says, I looked up for my coffee as he began to stir his.
And then he summarized his question with one statement.
What really matters?
What counts?
Locato says, I looked at Ian for a long time.
The question hung in the air.
What should I have said?
What could I have said?
I could have told him about the church.
I could have given him a doctrinal answer or read him something classic like the 23rd
Psalm.
But that all seemed too small.
Maybe some thoughts on sexuality or prayer or the golden rule.
No.
Ian wanted the treasure.
He wanted the meat of it.
I stirred my coffee.
Ian stirred his.
I had no answer.
All my verses so obediently memorized seemed inappropriate.
All my canned responses seemed timid.
Yet now years later, he writes, I know what I would share with him.
From 1 Corinthians chapter 15, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I received,
that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture.
And then he says, there it is.
Almost too simple.
The part that matters is the cross.
No more and no less the cross.
My friend, it is the cross that matters to you today.
It is not the routine that you've been on.
It's not the plans you've laid out for your life.
It's not your hopes for the future.
What matters is the cross.
And this morning the cross of Christ intersects with your unsuspecting life.
And now the choice is what will you do with that cross?
Let's pray.
What will you do with it, friend?
The Christ who died on that cross invites you to come and to follow him, but you must
pick up the cross to do so.
It will change you.
It will affect every part of your life.
You can never be the same again, but you will have a destiny of heaven.
And you will have a life in this world of adventure with God that you will miss without
the cross.
Oh, that today you would respond to the Savior and give yourself to him and pick up his cross.
And Christian friend, you who have picked up the cross in that sense, how has the cross
impressed itself on your life?
On your walk with God, do you recognize who has given you that unpleasant assignment?
Do you see the source of the interruption?
It's God.
No longer debate the cross.
Don't complain about it, but say, Lord, I carry your cross as your disciple, and I carry
it with gratitude for the pain and for the change that it brings to my life.
Father, may we respond today to the cross in such a way that our lives will be the better
in Jesus' name.
I'm going to ask you to take your hymnal and open it with me to hymn 185.
And as we sing this hymn, if you today would trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
And maybe like Simon of old, you have been a religious person.
You've been devoted to your religion.
And yet today you understand that it's the cross that makes the difference, that brings
you into that relationship with God.
Oh, that today you would trust Him and respond to Him in faith.
However the cross has intersected with your life, I pray that you will respond to God.
And if you need to be saved, we invite you to come.
We'll have pastoral staff and elders here ready to pray with you to help you.
And if as a Christian you've been struggling with what the cross means in your life, and
there's been a rebellious attitude about it.
You've been fighting against God.
Will you today come and surrender and yield in us to Christ's Lordship in your life?
Let's stand together as we sing about the wondrous cross.