March 29, 2026
On the Way to the Cross
Matthew 26:6-13; 27:32; 20:20-21; 27:55-56
Today is Palm Sunday, a festival day. We have just come through the palm procession. Like the crowd on that day in Jerusalem, we shout “Hosanna!”, wave our branches and imagine the joy of welcoming the Savior to the city.
But very quickly, things change.
Because Palm Sunday is the threshold to Holy Week. The crowd disperses. The palms are laid aside. The Passion begins. This is the week the church slows down and pays close attention. We slow down and pay attention, frame by frame. What happens in the next few days is the center of our faith. It is the essence of the good news, and the heart of our hope.
As we approach the story today, I want us to take a slightly different tack. Let us go beyond the Palm Sunday process and visit with three characters of Holy Week. Not the main characters — not Jesus, or Pilate, not Peter. Three people at the edges of the story.
I invite you to imagine your way into their lives, put yourself in their shoes. Find yourself with them in the company of Jesus.
An anonymous woman. A stranger from Africa. A bold mother.
Two days before Passover, Jesus is in Bethany, at the home of a man named Simon the leper. He is reclining at table with his disciples. A woman comes in.
She is carrying an alabaster jar of ointment. It’s pure nard imported from the Himalayan highlands, pressed and sealed. Such a precious import in that time and place! It was the kind of thing you saved your whole life for, or inherited, or gave as the most significant gift you could give. The disciples later estimated it was worth three hundred denarii. A year’s wages.
She comes into the house and approaches Jesus. She breaks the jar. You can’t pour from an alabaster flask without breaking the neck. Once it’s broken, the flask is finished. You can’t save half for later. She pours it all over Jesus’ head, and the room fills with the smell of it.
The disciples are indignant. The Greek word is aganaktéō. They are morally outraged. They frame it as concern for the poor. And they are not entirely wrong. A year’s wages would have fed a lot of hungry people. Their logic makes sense. It is practical utility: doing the most good for the most people with what you have.
But Jesus stops them. “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me.”
The Greek is kalon ergon, a beautiful work. Jesus could have said, what she did is acceptable. Or, it is kind. Instead, he calls it beautiful, a word that has moral force like truth and goodness. And then he helps them understand: “She has prepared my body for burial.” Her act was a symbolic anointing. Then he says something that is said of no other person in the gospels: “Wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”
She will be remembered wherever the gospel is preached. And Matthew never tells us her name.
Here is what is happening in this room. In a few hours, Judas will go to the chief priests and sell Jesus for thirty pieces of silver — a third of what this woman just poured on his head. The disciples have been told three times that Jesus is going to die. They have not understood.
This woman, without a word, without a theological framework, without any education or training, without even a name — she understood. And she responded to the magnitude of who Jesus is with the only proportionate response: everything she had.
We live in a world that calculates the value of everything. The cost and worth of a decision. The return on an investment. The output of an hour of human labor. There is now growing anticipation for robotic technology to do more of what humans do — faster, cheaper, more efficiently – in factories that don’t even require light.
Into this calculating world, here is a precious broken jar. She is showing us the only proportionate response of discipleship.
Jesus came all the way down to us. He did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself – he poured himself out – for us and our salvation. For eternal life and the death of death, and new creation.
Isaac Watts looked at the cross and wrote: “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” The anonymous woman with an alabaster jar embodied those words, in a room that smelled like worship, and she has been remembered for it ever since.
Now, let’s look through the eyes of another. On the road to Golgotha, the soldiers need someone to carry the cross. Jesus has been beaten and flogged and he cannot carry it any further. They look around. They find a man coming in from the country. He’s arriving in Jerusalem, probably for Passover, probably with his own plans for the day.
His name is Simon. He is from Cyrene, a city in North Africa. Simon is a diaspora Jew, far from home, maybe in the wrong place at the wrong time. The soldiers compel him. The Greek word is ēggareusan, a technical term for the Roman right to press a subjugated person into service. He has no choice. The cross is laid on his shoulders.
But Luke adds one detail: Simon carries the cross behind Jesus. Now, Luke wants us to see this picture. In every gospel, this is the posture of discipleship. Follow me, Jesus says, again and again. And here is a man following him to the hill, with the cross on his back, without ever having agreed to it.
He didn’t choose this. It was chosen for him.
I’ve been thinking about how many of us come to faith that way. I was raised in a household of Christian faith. I was dedicated to Christ before I could speak. I was shaped by the Christian community before I could evaluate whether I wanted to belong to it or it fit me. Along the way I chose it, yes, and I can point to decisive moments. But it also chose me. And I can’t say I found the gospel as much as the gospel found me.
I’ve known so many people over the years whose faith has deepened the same way Simon’s did — not through a clear decision but through a series of unexpected drafts. Whether they were raised as Christians or not. They went on a mission trip because a friend asked them. They married someone who took faith seriously. They moved next door to a church, and why not? They got involved in a homeless ministry or a justice project. They hit a crisis that cracked them open and needed a community of care.
And they found themselves, almost without noticing, walking behind Jesus. The cross was laid on their shoulders and somewhere on the road they realized they had become disciples.
Simon’s story has never stopped being somebody’s story. There are still people seized by forces they did not choose, pressed into the middle of someone else’s conflict, carrying weight that wasn’t theirs to carry. The world has not run out of conscription. And the gospel has not run out of ways to find people in the middle of it.
Can we see ourselves in these characters? Look at Simon carrying the cross behind Jesus. He is compelled, reluctant, unprepared, disoriented, and being pulled by a strange grace. Is something like that happening to us, you? Is God’s strange grace pulling you in, leading you forward, in a way you can’t quite name yet?
Simon of Cyrene is an invitation to our own discipleship. To follow Jesus. It is not an invitation to spectacular suffering. Bearing the cross is not a burden that God assigns us the way Roman soldiers assigned it to him. Carrying the cross means being faithful to Christ in the posture of identifying our lives with Jesus. Sharing in his teachings, his service, and sometimes in his suffering. That posture, that way of following, sometimes looks weak or foolish. It will often look small. Yet, concealed under the weakness of the cross is the power and wisdom of God.
Now, just one more. A mother named Salome. She is named in Mark, though Matthew calls her only “the mother of the sons of Zebedee.” She appears twice in Matthew’s gospel, and the distance between her two appearances is the distance between everything she wanted and everything she got.
The first time she appears, she comes to Jesus with her sons and kneels before him. The Greek word is proskunéō, the word for worship. She is a believer, a follower. She has given her sons to follow Jesus, and now she wants Jesus to give them something in return.
“Say that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.”
It is a mother’s request. You know what they say, “Mama loves her boys.” Many of us, sons and daughters, were blessed to have mothers who looked at us like Salome looks at them. She has watched them leave their father’s fishing boat and follow this teacher across Galilee. She worried about what would happen. She wants their faithfulness rewarded. There is nothing cynical in her. She believes Jesus is the Messiah. She believes the kingdom is coming. She wants her sons to be in it and near it.
Jesus looks at her gently. “You do not know what you are asking.”
Now, the second time she appears in Matthew is at Golgotha. She is in the group of women watching from a distance as Jesus is crucified. And at his right hand and his left — the places she asked for — are not two faithful sons, but two criminals.
Matthew does not comment on this. He simply reports it. If you are following the story, you feel it. She asked for the right hand and the left. She got the cross. And yet she was there.
The gap between what she asked for and what she stayed to witness is not a small one. She came to Jesus with a mother’s hope and a believer’s confidence. She asked for something good, something that made sense given what she believed. And what came to pass was harder and more costly than anything she had imagined.
We know that gap, in measures smaller and often greater than Salome. There is very often gap between what we ask of God and what we receive. And it is often not small.
We pray for a peaceful world, and what arrives is the steady progression of wars. We pray for a just world, what arrives is injustice and the call to resistance. We pray for leaders with the humility of this humble king on a donkey… and instead…
We pray for healing and what arrives is more pain. We pray for reconciliation and what arrives is even more shattering. Each of us has encountered a circumstance we hoped God would fix remain broken.
Salome could have left. As did most of the male disciples, she could have fled in fear. But she did not. She stayed close to Jesus. She knelt before the mystery of the cross with her confusion and her grief, in the wreckage of what she’d hoped for.
And because of her faithfulness…
… she stayed long enough to witness the resurrection.
If we just look ahead a little bit…in case you don’t make it next Sunday…
Matthew 28 tells us that the women came to the tomb at first light. Among them Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” and the women who had been there at the cross. Salome stayed. Through the Sabbath, through the silence, through the harrowing of hell and the harrowing of her own soul. She stayed.
And when the angel rolled back the stone and the women ran from the tomb with fear and joy, she was among them.
God’s answer on Resurrection Day was not smaller than what Salome asked for. It was larger than she could have ever imagined. She asked for her sons near a throne. What she witnessed was the resurrection of the Messiah, the death of death and the beginning of the new creation.
Can we see ourselves in Salome? Can we bring our disappointments and our grief to the cross and wait?
This week, the church walks slowly and tells the story line by line, person by person. These three were there before, and they are witnesses to us of how to live with faith and follow Christ.
Breaking open a treasure in gratitude. Carrying an unexpected cross with faithfulness. Holding disappointed prayers and deep questions in the presence of the Savior whose promised resurrection is on the way.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina