Simon of Cyrene appears for a single verse, an ordinary man coming in from the country, probably a Passover pilgrim with no connection to Jesus, seized by Roman soldiers and made to carry the cross 26"behind Jesus." He did not volunteer. An anonymous bystander is swept into the most consequential walk in history, carrying for however many steps the weight Jesus was too weakened to carry alone. Luke's wording, behind Jesus, echoes how Jesus described discipleship, taking up the cross daily and following him (Luke 9:23). Mark names Simon's sons, Alexander and Rufus (Mark 15:21), which suggests the family became known to the first readers of that Gospel. Whether or not Simon understood, for one forced afternoon he pictures what Jesus asked every willing follower to do.
Behind them walks 27"a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him," grief on public display. Jesus turns to the women and tells them to weep for themselves and for their children, and the instruction reorders their grief. Even now, carrying a cross to his execution, he looks outward, more concerned about what is coming upon them than about what is happening to him.
What is coming will be devastating enough that ordinary values invert: 29"Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!" In that culture childlessness was widely felt as tragedy. Jesus foresees a day when never having borne children will be counted a mercy, because no child will have to live through what is coming. People will say to the mountains 30"Fall on us" and to the hills 30"Cover us," preferring burial under a collapsing hillside to what awaits them. It is the devastation he wept over days earlier, riding down from the Mount of Olives, now named again from beneath his own cross.
Then the final line: 31"if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?" Green wood does not burn easily, and dry wood catches at once. Jesus is the green wood, innocent, and still condemned to this. If Rome and a corrupt court will do this to someone innocent, what will happen to a city and a generation that has rejected its own Messiah, dry wood already primed for the fire? The judgment he describes is the predictable outcome of choices the city has repeatedly made.
Even carrying his cross, Jesus' compassion has not narrowed to himself. He weeps over Jerusalem twice in this Gospel, once from the Mount of Olives looking down at the city he loved (Luke 19:41), and once in effect here, walking through its streets to die for it, more concerned for these women and their children than for the suffering that is already visibly his own.
Compassion that survives a cross is the compassion that was there before it. Whose suffering have you been too absorbed in your own to see? Weep this week for someone else, and let it move you to act.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a Son whose compassion did not shrink under the weight of his own cross, still turned outward toward grief that was not his own. Teach us that outward-facing love, unwilling to let our own suffering close our eyes to whoever is suffering, or about to suffer, around us. And where judgment is coming, on a city or on a life, let us hear the warning while there is still time to weep. In Jesus' name, amen.