A STRANGER HELPS

 

"He is laboring under His cross.  It is too much for Him to carry alone.  Everyone can see that, but no one offers to help Him.  Someone, then, must be forced.  The soldiers seize upon Simon of Cyrene.  It has, or he thinks it has, nothing to do with him.  He was simply about his own business in Jerusalem.  It seems to him mere chance that he met this tragic procession – an unlucky chance for him, but there it is!  He is made to take up the load and help this man, a stranger to him, and whom he supposes to be a criminal on the way to his execution.

Really there is no chance in the incident.  It is something planned by God from eternity to show men the way of Christ’s love: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  It means that no one is meant to suffer alone.  No one is meant to carry his own cross without some other human being to help him.

Again Christ is proving to the world that He has come to live the life of all ordinary men on the simplest human terms.  Now as He accepts the reluctant help of Simon – accept it because He perforce must, and yet in His humility gratefully – He is showing each one of us whom He will indwell, what He asks of us and what He wants us to give to one another. 

Simon of Cyrene saw only three criminals (of whom Christ was one) on the way to die.  He could not know, until he had taken up that stranger’s cross, that in it was the secret of his own salvation.  Simon thought at first that Christ was no business of his.  He did not even know him; he did not seem to be worth helping; his own interrupted business in Jerusalem that day seemed much more important to him.  Why should he put his own business aside, why give his strength, his time, and even his suffering for this man?  (He must have suffered.  The hard, heavy wood would have torn and blistered his hands.  Or if one end of the cross was laid on his shoulder, it would have bruised it as it bruised Christ’s.  The way to Calvary must have been exhausting, and have sapped the energy he wanted for his own affairs.  Again, he must have suffered mentally: the frustration of his own plans, perhaps those on which very much depended; and the humiliation of being ordered to do this thing by the hated Roman soldiers – bits of boys anyway, who found it amusing to inconvenience and make mock of a Jew!)

We must be ready to carry the burden of anyone whom we meet on our way and who clearly needs help, not only those who “deserve,” or seem to “deserve,” help.  Everyone is our “business,” and Christ in everyone, potentially or actually, has a first claim on us, a claim that comes before all else.

We are here on Earth to help to carry the cross of Christ, the Christ hidden in other men, and to help in whatever way we can.  We may, like Simon, have literally a strong arm to give, we may help to do hard work; we may have material goods to give; we may have time, which we desperately want for ourselves but which we must sacrifice for Christ in man.  We may have only suffering.  Suffering is the most precious coin of all.  Suffering of body, suffering of mind, paid down willingly for Christ in man, enables Him to carry His redeeming cross through the world to the end of time. 

Suffering contains in itself that Simon gave: our mind and body, frustration, and identification with someone else.  That last is the germ of our own salvation, that way to transform the self-pity that is the danger in all suffering into the love of other people which reaches out a hand to Christ, and saves us.

We do not look for Christ only in saints; we look for Him, perceive Him by faith, and try to help Him, most of all in sinners.  It is in sinners that Christ suffers most today, in them that His need is most urgent.” (Caryll Houselander) 

                Art: Ang Kiukok- Philippines