Are You A Bystander? Series

His name was “Simon.” It means “God has Heard.” And today it would certainly seem that God had heard his many, many prayers. Today was the day that he and his two boys, Alexander and Rufus, would finally get to see Jerusalem, the mighty and holy city of God, with their own eyes. All of his life he had dreamed of the day when he would get to enter the gates of Jerusalem … to stand on the very mountain where Abraham almost sacrificed his only son, Isaac … the city that King David made his capital … the place where King Solomon built the first. They were going to walk the very streets where Jeremiah and Isaiah prophesized … touch the very walls that Nehemiah had rebuilt. Jerusalem … the very center of the Jewish world.

Although the city was filled with history, the thing that they wanted to see the most was the new Temple … “Herod’s Temple.” It was called that because old King Herod had expanded and remodeled the old Temple before he went mad with suspicion. Work on it had begun several decades ago. The main structure was done but some of the perimeter areas were still under construction. While it was not widely recognized as one of the great wonders of the world … like the pyramids of Egypt ... the Colossus of Rhoades … or the Temple of Aphrodite in Ephesus … it was the most endearing and most important, most impressive and beautiful structure in the world for all the descendants of Abraham.

You might say that Jerusalem was Simon’s most favorite place in the world … even though he had never been there before. But God had heard his prayers and now, not only was he there … in Jerusalem … but he was there with his two sons during an amazing time … Passover!

Historians estimate that as many as 100,000 pilgrims would come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Seder or Passover festival in Simon’s day. Those who lived close enough could attend the festival every year. For others, like Simon, however, it was a once-in-a-lifetime dream come true. I would hazard a guess that seeing Jerusalem with his own eyes was the first … and possibly the only item … on Simon’s “bucket list.”

The fact that Simon was there was no small feat! You see, Simon was from the city of Cyrene … which was the capital city of the district of Cyrenaica in Northern Africa. There were many Jews in Cyrene. Over the centuries, hardship and warfare had forced many Jews to flee and spread out all over Northern Africa, the Mediterranean, and central Europe. At the time that Simon lived there, the Jewish population in Cyrene numbered in the tens of thousands. Even so, his people were a minority in the area. While far from the land promised to Abraham thousands of years ago, they worked hard to observe the traditions and practices of their people and preserve their heritage.

Ever since he was a boy, Simon and his family observed Passover. When he was the youngest at the dinner table, he would ask the opening questions, beginning with: “What makes this night different from all the others?” And each year he would be mesmerized by the story of how God used Moses and the 10 plagues to break down Pharaoh to the point that he finally let the Hebrew slaves go. He would get a chill down his spine when he would hear about the Passover lamb, whose blood was placed over each family’s door so that the Lord’s Angel of Death would “pass over” that home. At the end of every Passover celebration, Simon and his family would declare: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

“Next year in Jerusalem.” What a dream! He could picture it in his mind. He didn’t have picture books or postcards or the internet to show him images of what Jerusalem looked like. All he had were the descriptions that he had heard from the neighbors and the town folks who had actually gone to Jerusalem and seen the Temple. They would describe their experience in vivid detail. They described support columns so massive that it took three men with outstretched arms to embrace one. Simon would listen intently, hanging on their every word, as they described how the outside of the Temple was covered with so much gold that it blazed like fire in the noonday sun and you couldn’t look directly at it with out hurting your eyes. He would picture the priests going about their duties in robes made of the finest linen. He tried to imagine the walls of the Temple. which were over a hundred feet tall. Every time he heard these stories, it made him want to go more and more. Just to see Jerusalem would have been a dream come true but to be there during Passover … well … he didn’t even dare to think that such a thing was possible.