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[The message is now being recorded.] Your message for the moment with Dr. Bruce W. Thielman, Crossroads, number six in the Via Dolorosa series. [Dr. W. Thielman is recording the message.]

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Let us now give reverent attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Luke, beginning at the verse number twenty-six. And as they led Jesus away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country.

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And on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus. And there followed him a great company of people and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him. And Jesus turning unto them said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for

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yourselves and for your children. And behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, 'Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bear, and the paps which never gave suck.' Then they shall begin to say to the mountains, 'Fall on us,' and to the hills, 'Cover us.'

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For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" And there were also two other malefactors led with him to be put to death. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy words. There are many paths to Golgotha.

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There are many roads to Calvary. There are many ways to the place of the skull. But in the end, each and every one of these ways, paths, roads, ends as a Via Dolorosa. No matter how you choose to approach the cross, in the end, just before you get there, you

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must walk with Jesus. You may come to his way of suffering by some alternative route. That is, the course of your life may not be directed to the Calvary which was his. But if in your life you are seeking to serve him, there will be some place in the course

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of your days where the highway of your experience will intersect with the way he carried his cross. There will be, as it were, a crossroad. And at that point, you too will be on the Via Dolorosa.

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The Roman Catholic Church has a discipline of devotion called the "Stations of the Cross," through which penitent Roman Catholics pray. According to Roman Catholic tradition, there are fourteen stations on this cross. The first occurred in the barracks of the Roman soldiers, where we were last week.

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The last five occurred on Calvary, where we will be next week. But there are eight stations between the barracks and Calvary, between the Praetorium and Golgotha, eight places where Roman Catholics pause specially to meditate and pray. Some of these places are not mentioned in Scripture.

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They are part of the tradition of the Roman Church. We shall mention them this morning, but we shall not do more than that. But there are a couple of crossroads, a couple of points where the life of another crosses the life of Jesus right there at the Via Dolorosa that we want to ponder very deeply.

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And this we shall do after we have prayed. Let us pray. O God, our Father, walk with us as we walk with Jesus. Amen.

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Going to tradition, immediately after the cross was put on Jesus' shoulders, he staggered and fell against the doorway of a house beside the road there in Jerusalem. And the owner of the house opened the door and beat him and spat upon him for disturbing the quiet of the place.

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And Jesus turned and looked at the man, and remember this is not but tradition, there is no historical evidence to support it. And he said, "Thou shalt go on from this place, and thou shalt never stop until I come again." And the story goes that from that day until this, this man wanders this planet, that he

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will in fact continue to wander this planet, the most miserable of men, until that time comes when our Lord returns. This story is of course known classically as the tale of the wandering Jew. It is part of the repeated traditional literature of the Christian Church.

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And it's a story, and nothing more than a story. But while it has no historical truth, it does have a spiritual truth. And that truth is this, no man spurns, no man turns away from the Christ bearing his cross without condemning himself to a life of final tragedy.

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So today as we walk the Via Dolorosa, no matter what happens, we must not turn. We must keep our eyes fixed on our Savior. The road turned west and started to go up a slight ascent. And according to tradition, as it went up this ascent, Jesus fell three times.

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And then they arrived at a corner and began to turn to the northwest. If you were in Jerusalem today, you would find on that corner a sign which stated that it was at this point that Mary stood and watched as Jesus passed by. Again, there is no historical evidence that this is true, yet it is reasonable to assume,

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isn't it, that Mary was there. If she was at the cross while he died, it is fair to assume, isn't it, that she did not let him walk to the cross by himself, that she was there in the crowd, pushing her way along the side of the street, trying to be at his side every moment of the time?

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We'll not pause to ponder Mary now, we'll see her on Calvary next week. But it is somehow comforting, at least, to notice that his mother was walking beside him. Now the road continues toward the west, our shadows are before us again.

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And if you were walking that road in Jerusalem this morning, you would come to a small shrine. And that shrine has been built upon the spot where, again, according to tradition, Simon of Cyrene met Jesus. Now the spot is a traditional one, but that Simon met Jesus on the Via Dolorosa is not

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just tradition, it is fact. It is most important fact. You see, we get the picture sometimes that as Jesus walked through that street, he was carrying his entire cross.

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All of the depictions of the scene had him carrying the cross in its traditional form, but there's little doubt that that is not true. The cross was of two parts, the staticulum, or the vertical beam, which was left permanently in place in the ground.

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It was not carried by those to be crucified. That which was carried was the patibulum, or the horizontal bar. The victim would carry it, and on arriving at the place of crucifixion, would be nailed to it, and then by ropes and pulleys it would be hoisted into place.

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So Jesus is carrying this single bar. But even the weight of this single bar is too much for him. Now ponder this, he has gone for twenty-four hours without food or drink, and in the last meal which he did enjoy, there was an emotional exhaustion as part of it, which must have

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drained him. And then there were those moments in Gethsemane when the deep waters rolled up over his soul. And then all the hurrying and shoving and debasement of the night. Genesis, Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, back to Pilate, the soldiers, hour after hour of it,

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with no rest and no respite, and now he carries this single bar of wood, and even this is too much for him. See the procession, first the Roman soldier bearing the placard with the words Pilate had written, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews."

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And then a quaternion of soldiers, and in the midst of this quaternion, the staggering Savior. And behind him the two other criminals, and each of them surrounded by a quaternion of Roman soldiers.

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Now these other criminals do not fall beneath the weight of the bars they carry. For they, you see, have not known the sixteen hours of agonizing trial and mistrial which Jesus knew before this hour. They too had known the flogging, the preparatio ad cursum, the preparation for the cross,

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but they had not known all that he had borne before that. They can carry the weight of the cross, but he can't. And he staggers, and he falls, and he gets up and tries to crawl, and his arms give way beneath him, and he falls with his face in the dust of the Via Dolorosa.

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And his face is in that dust at precisely that point where the life of Simon of Cyrene intersects with his life. Simon was a Jew from North Africa. All of the evidence suggests that he was a black man.

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He had come to Jerusalem for the high holy days, the Feast of the Passover. The city was crowded. He found no place to dwell within it, so he was staying at some point in the country. And early in the morning he gets up to come to the temple.

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His heart is full of high and holy hope, ready for a day of religious exultation. And as he enters the gates of the city, he encounters a rabble that's surrounding a group of men who are being taken to be crucified. He has no interest in this.

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He wants to get to the temple. And using his great size, he begins to push his way through the crowd, wanting to get beyond it and on his way to the religious acts of devotion which are to be his. But just at that moment, when he gets to the front of the crowd, just at that moment, when

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he gets closest to those who are carrying the crosses, just at that moment, Jesus falls into the dust before him. And the Roman centurion, very experienced at these things, looks at Jesus and knows he cannot carry the bar one step further.

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And so he surveys the crowd. It was natural that he would see this big black man dressed in the unusual dress of North Africa. And he walks over to him, drawing his sword as he approaches him, and places the flap

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of his sword upon Simon's shoulder. Now anyone who lived beneath the heel of Roman oppression knew what that meant. When a Roman soldier put his sword upon your shoulder, that meant you were drafted, impressed, conscripted into his service.

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And you had no alternative. You obeyed or you died on the spot. Now Simon hated what was happening. Simon wanted to go to the temple.

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Simon would have been profaned by touching this instrument of death. It would have been impossible for him, after this act, to have entered into the acts of devotion which were going to be the fruit of that day in his life. Simon hated that Roman.

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It's very likely that Simon even hated this prisoner in the dust at his feet. But Simon wasn't stupid. He wasn't ready to give up his life for the sake of his hatred. So when the Roman said, "Carry the bar," he picked it up and he carried it.

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We make a great deal out of Simon of Cyrene as a cross-bearer. And that is unfortunate, for it is not true. He bore a burden, but he did not bear a cross. He did not pick up that bar because he wanted to.

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The Greek is very specific here. He was compelled. That's the word. He was compelled to do so.

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It's a burden for him, and there's a very great distinction between bearing a burden and bearing a cross. To bear a burden is to take upon yourself that responsibility, that infirmity, that weakness, that difficulty, that task, which is unavoidable.

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It is to carry that which you could not avoid carrying anyway. This is a burden. But a cross is that which you take up voluntarily. A cross is that which you do not have to bear, but which you do bear for the sake of Jesus

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Christ and those for whom Jesus Christ died. So what Simon carries is a burden. I don't belittle burden-bearers. There are multitudes of people who go through life with blindness or cripples, limited by

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disease, handicapped by heredity, suffering the burdens of baffled ambitions, bearing the load of care for indolent or indigent relatives. There are many people who go through life with all kinds of heartaches, carrying responsibilities and carrying them silently, not whining or whimpering about them.

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And we must pray for these burden-bearers, for great is their pain, and great is their courage. But there's a difference between a burden-bearer and a cross-bearer, for a cross-bearer does what he doesn't have to do.

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I think a good illustration of it occurred in the life of Bruce Larson, the founder of Faith at Work. He was visiting a friend in Canada. This friend had been a successful insurance executive and then had given up the insurance

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business and had gone into work in a rescue mission. And Bruce Larson was visiting him there, and some men came into the mission and reported old Charlies on his face out in the snow again. And immediately Bruce and Roy jumped up and rushed out and helped old Charlie up and discovered

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that he was not only drunk, but that he had in fact suffered a heart attack. Now in this little scene you see the difference between a burden-bearer and a cross-bearer. These men stepped over Charlie. They didn't pick him up.

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They felt responsible for him. They came in and reported the situation. I mean, after all, that was the decent thing to do. That was the proper thing to do.

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And they did that, but they did no more than that. But Roy and Bruce, when they got to work, they jumped up and rushed out and picked Charlie up and began to minister to his needs. They didn't have to do it either, but they did it.

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That's the difference between a burden-bearer and a cross-bearer. There are multitudes of Christians, you see, who have enough faith, enough confidence in Christ, enough courage because of Christ, that they can go through life carrying burdens which are awesome.

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But that's all they do. Oh, they may teach a Sunday school class every once in a while because everybody should take their turn. They may usher or sing in the choir or tutor in South Glendale or give volunteer hours

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to this social service or that because, after all, that's what every citizen should do. They do that, and that's burden-bearing, and that's noble, and that's to be complimented and praised, but that is not what Jesus meant when he said, "Whosoever is worthy of me must take up his cross and come after me."

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For the one who takes up the cross joyfully rushes into the midst of situations that he could easily avoid, plunges himself into them up to the elbows, into all the ugliness and the stink and the hell of them, and does it all for the sake of Jesus Christ and for the sake of other men.

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That's the cross-bearer. He doesn't believe Madison Avenue when Madison Avenue says, "The way to live is with a new kind of beer and a new suit and fly the friendly skies of United to Florida or the Hawaiian Islands."

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He believes that life is really lived when you plunge yourself into the midst of another man's suffering for the sake of Jesus Christ. He's a cross-bearer. So Simon picks up his burden, but when he puts it down a few minutes later on Calvary,

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it's become a cross. Something happened on the journey. I don't know. It's not detailed, but Simon came to love Jesus.

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In the book of Romans and in the book of Acts, we read about Simon's sons. They were some of the most distinguished Christians of the day, and there's no doubt that they inherited their faith from their father. Something happened to Simon on the Via Dolorosa.

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And that's often the way it is in life, isn't it? We get ourselves caught into some very distressing, despairing, agonizing situation, and right there in the midst of that situation we encounter Jesus, perhaps as we've never encountered him before.

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How often the Prince of Peace comes through pain. Benny Abernathy was a young fellow who went into a used car lot to buy a car, entered into some tentative arrangements with the salesman, and then never showed up to claim the car.

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After a couple of weeks, the salesman called the home, and Benny's wife told the salesman that in the meantime it had been discovered that Benny had inoperable cancer, that he was in the hospital, that he would not be coming home, and that he would never be driving an automobile again.

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This used car salesman, a man named Bert, was a Christian, a cross-bearer, and although he didn't have to, he went to see Benny. And they sat in the room and talked for a while, and then preparing to bear his witness, Bert looked at Benny and he said, "I hope the Lord is giving you peace in this."

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And Benny turned to him, and his face lighted up, lighted up so almost the whole room was lumined by its radiance, and he said, "I want to tell you what happened to me yesterday. I was lying here terribly distressed and wondering if I was close to God. That may sound strange, but I was wondering about it.

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I've always believed in God, but I've heard people talk about being born again and being committed to Jesus Christ, and nothing like that has ever happened to me. And so I finally just closed my eyes and I prayed, 'God, come near to me.' And he said, "When I opened my eyes, Jesus was standing in the corner of my room."

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I know it sounds strange, but he was standing right there, and Benny looked at that place as if he was still standing there. And he said, "Great numbers of people were coming up to him, and when they came to him, they would reach inside their clothing and they would take out their hearts and they

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would hand their heart to him, and he would smile and they would go on. Grown-ups first, and then a lot of children came that way." And I watched this, and finally I got up and I went over and I reached inside my robe and I took out my heart and I handed it to him.

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And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said one word. He said, "Peace." And then he was gone. And there was a long pause, and Bert, the visiting salesman, said, "That's wonderful."

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And Benny said, "That's more than wonderful. That's the truest thing that's ever happened to me in all my life." He said, "It filled me with so much joy that I have promised God and promised myself that no person will come into this room without hearing from me about that experience before

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they go. And no person did come into that room and leave it without hearing that experience." Caught up, you see, in the disease, caught up in pain like he'd never known before, with all of his life crumbling and breaking about him, right at the moment when he felt weakened.

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Jesus put his hand on his shoulder and said, "Peace." And that's something like what happened to Simon. Call forth the great names of the history of the church. Let them march before you this morning and they'll testify to this truth again and again.

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Let me call them from their graves, the apostolic martyrs Peter and Paul. And Paul says, "For me to live is Christ, but to die is gain." The martyrs of the Neronian persecution come out claiming, "For us to live was Jesus, but to die is gain and our blood is the seed of the church."

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Call forth the martyrs of the Domitian persecution, the cruelest persecution the church ever knew, and their song of faith rises above all the cacophony of horror that surrounded them. Call forth the martyrs of the Reformation and hear Theodore Beza as he looks into the eyes of a heathen king and says to him, "It is given to the church to receive blows rather

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than to give them, but I would remind you that a good anvil wears out many hammers." Or go to the modern days of mission service. Hear Jim Elliott as he testifies before he goes off to Ecuador to die with Alcaeros in his breast.

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Hear him as he says, "That man is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." These people again and again in the midst of agony and service and pain and loving Christ at awesome cost, find a peace with him that can't be found in any other way.

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Just what Simon of Cyrene said. Well the road turns uphill now. Here's the place where Veronica is supposed to have wiped Jesus' face with her veil, again a traditional tale.

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And you come a little higher to where there used to be a gate called the Gate of Judgment, but today there's a Greek monastery and there's an old pillar in that monastery, older than the monastery itself. And on that pillar is recorded the fact that it was here that Jesus met the women of Jerusalem.

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And this story is written on the pages of Scripture too. Executions, you see, are private today. They haven't always been private in America. It wasn't too long ago, right here in California, that a lynching was a public event.

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In all the accounts I've read of public executions, however, I've noted that the crowd who witnesses the spectacle is always silent. That makes us silent, you see, because we all know in our hearts that the time will come for us to die.

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So the crowd was quiet that day. So that when they got to this place and they encountered a group of women, not the wives of Pharisees and Sadducees, but just plain, ordinary housewives of Jerusalem, carrying their children in their arms or dragging their children behind them.

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And they came to these women and these women broke out with mourning and with wailing. The sound was immediately noticeable. And Jesus turns and He looks at them. And under His gaze they become quiet.

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And everyone's quiet now. Even the soldiers are quiet. For Jesus is going to speak. Now remember before Pilate the second time He didn't speak.

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Before Herod He didn't speak. With the soldiers He didn't speak. So this time on the journey He has not spoken. This is the only word He speaks between Herod and the cross.

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And what does He say? He says to the women two things. First, "Do not weep for me. I don't want your pity.

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I have no need of your sympathy. What I am doing I am doing because I want to do it. No man takes my life from me. I lay down my life of myself."

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Jesus says, "I have no need of your sympathy. I lay down my life of myself." And as John Brown walked up the ladder to the tree branch from which He was hanged, He handed a slip of paper to one of His executioners.

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And written on that slip of paper were these words, "I now believe that the sins of this guilty nation will never be purged away except with blood." So John Brown died. And three years later, almost to the day, on September 17, 1862, the very tree from

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which Brown was hanged shook with the thunder of artillery, and the leaves were loosed by the concussion of the cannonade. When the sun had risen on that place in the morning, it had looked down upon a beautiful spade of cornfield.

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The tassels were full. It was the time of harvest. There was a little silver stream that ran through. It was called the Antietam, one of the headwaters of the Potomac, a small bridge across it.

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Straight hedged rows and carefully worked fences. But that night, when the moon rose over that place, it saw one of those sights which forever shamed all the pretense of wisdom that men claimed. Corn was trampled flat, cut down by a fleet of lead.

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The fences were smashed and the hedgerows were destroyed. The orchards were mauled and mangled. The great barns had become field hospitals in which surgeons bathed in blood to their elbows, cut and hacked and sawed by the lights of the lanterns, so it looked like a scene

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from Dante's deepest hell. And out there, by those fences and those broken hedges, along the banks of that no longer silver stream and upon that bridge and beneath it, there lay their pallid white faces, voicing youth protest to that autumn moon.

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There lay 23,481 dead boys, almost every one of them less than 20 years of age. One day, half of what we've lost in Vietnam in 11 years. And yet, with the blood that they poured out, a terrible wrong in this country was righted. An unspeakable crime against the human spirit was corrected.

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You see, there's written into the warp and roof of the universe a law of sacrifice, a law of blood, if you will. And what Jesus was saying to these women on the road to his cross was this, "I must spill my blood.

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I want to spill my blood. I want to pour out every drop of my blood for you and all those who will accept what I do. Do not weep for me, for I am doing that for which I came, and the sacrifice which I make

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is made out of a loving heart." If we stand on the Via Dolorosa and only weep at what we see, my friends, if we only cry because of what our Christ endured, then his journey is in vain. He does not ask for our sobs or our cries or our tears.

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He asks for our very lives. He says, "I do this for your life. I lay down my life for your life." And then, pressing the point home to these women, he says, "Weep not for me, but weep

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for yourselves, for the time is coming." And in fact, it was only 35 years away. The time is coming when you'll wish the mountains would fall on you, and you'll wish the hillsides would cover you up, and these children that you carry with you and walk with you, that

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you love and boast about and enjoy, you'll pray to God that they have never been born. He was prophesying the fall of Jerusalem. Historians agree it was the most horrible siege in human history. I won't detail it for you this morning, but it came through exactly as our Lord Jesus

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Christ said it would come through. And he, crying out to these women, is uttering to them a fearsome word, and that word is this, "You will either give me your guilt to carry, or you'll carry your guilt yourself." I had a woman tell me in my office the other day that we Christians were frightfully narrow.

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"Maintaining that no one could come to God except by his Son. That was narrow and hard-hearted and cruel," she said. And I looked at her and I replied, "Does God require virtually endless reincarnations as the Hindus preach?

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Does our God require cruel and confining legalisms of which the Muslims make much? Does our God demand of us that we give ourselves to endless rituals like the devout Buddhists? Does our God say that we must throw ourselves into orgies or enter into mathematical studies of the stars like the weird sects of yesterday and the weirder sects of today?

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Does our God require these legalisms, these rituals, these reincarnations, these studies of logic or donations of all of your time? Is this what our God requires?" "No!" he says.

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"Receive by sight. Just go to him. Take out your heart and give it to him with everything in your heart you don't want anybody to know about.

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Give that to him." Narrow, confining, cruel. That's the best news in all the history of the world. And that's what he did on his Via Dolorosa.

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Well once, when I was about twelve, I was fishing in Pimatumin Lake at the lake not far from Pittsburgh. Early in the evening, that's the best time to get smallmouth. And a storm came up.

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It got very dark very quickly. And the rain was heavy. And I had difficulty finding my way. I did a very foolish thing, walking through a lightning storm with a fishing pole in my

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hand. And the lightning came. And I was glad that the lightning came because when the lightning came I could see the path and I could see the trees and I could see the rocks and I could see the turning.

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Now the lightning did not create the rocks or the trees or the path or the turning. The lightning revealed it, you see. And I've been in prayer all week long that this sermon will be to some of you, lightning. I know that some of you have been walking this Via Dolorosa with us over the last weeks.

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And I know right now you're standing in the presence of a Christ whose arms are spread very wide to you. And I know right now that He's reaching out to you and He's saying to you, "Give me your heart.

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I'm going on and I'm taking with me the weight of a whole world's guilt. Will you let the weight of your guilt be part of that weight? I'm ready to bear it all for you." He stands there right in front of you now on the Via Dolorosa.

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See it in the lightning of these words! You decide. You've got to decide. For you see, Calvary's just ahead now.

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And the darkness is gathering in all around. And either He is going to bear everything in you you can hardly bear, or else you're going to have to suffer and die alone. I can't understand why you find the decision to be so hard.

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Oh God, someone in this room is at the edge of the Via Dolorosa. Christ is passing by. Grant that they might come forward here and meet with one who is ready to put their hand into the hand of Jesus.

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And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you his peace.