Minding your own business, as you are headed somewhere and bam! Your whole day or what you thought you were going to do, gets derailed. That is what seemed to happen to Simon of Cyrene. He was minding his own business, very possibly headed to the synagogue and all of a sudden, a Roman soldier essentially grabbed him and told him he was going to carry the wooden crosspiece for a blooded, fairly unrecognizable human.
“As they led him away, they (Roman soldiers) seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus.” (Luke 23:26). (Also Matthew 27:32 and Mark 15:21). Talk about going from being a nobody to being mentioned in the Bible that will make note of this random encounter for the rest of history.
Simon came from Cyrene which was in east Libya (northern Africa), a Greek city and a Jewish center. Possibly he was dark-skinned but is definitely mentioned as the father of two guys, one being Rufus who people figured is mentioned in Romans 16. This Simon might be the Simon spoken of in Acts 13:1 who was a prophet or teacher in Antioch’s church.
The point is, we do not know much about this person who was commanded or basically forced to do what the Roman soldiers told him to do. Ther ...
