Somebody Carried It for Him Too

The van could not get up the hill. That is how it starts, at four o'clock on a Thursday, with a driver apologizing at the bottom of the street and a secondhand washing machine on the sidewalk in the last of the good light.

It is a hundred and ten yards to his door. He knows because he counted it once, years ago, with a boy on his shoulders, for a bet.

He is forty-eight. He gets the machine onto the hand truck the way you do, with a knee and a bad word he does not say out loud because of the woman watering her pots two houses up. Then he starts. The wheels catch in the gutter about every eight feet, and each time they catch he has to take the whole weight on his forearms and lift, and the hill does not stop being a hill.

There are three children in that house and the old machine died on Sunday, and there is a laundromat two bus rides away, and he has done that twice this week and is not doing it a third time. So the machine goes up the hill. That is the whole plan and it is a good plan.

At about sixty yards the man from number 34 comes out. Younger. Puts a hand on the frame and says, "Let me take the front."

"You're all right. Nearly there."

He is not being proud. Understand that before you decide anything about him. He is the one who helps: he moved a sofa for number 34 in the spring, jumped four cars on this street, put up two sets of shelves, sat with a dog while somebody was at the hospital. It is not that he thinks he is above being helped. It is that in thirty years he has not once been on this end of it, and his body does not know the movement.

Twenty yards later the wheel catches hard and the machine leans and he gets it back, and the man from 34 has not gone inside. He is still there.

"Seriously. Let me take the front."

"I've got it."

And then the man from 34 does the thing that makes this a story rather than an incident. He does not ask again. He walks around, puts both hands under the front corner, and lifts, and says, "Right, on three."

And they go up the last forty yards together in the golden light, past the woman with the watering can who says something about the sun, past two kids on bikes who have to move, and the wheels do not catch once, because there are four hands on it now instead of two.

At the door the man from 34 says, "That was heavier than it looked," which is a kindness, and goes home.

And he stands in his own doorway with his hands shaking slightly and a washing machine in the hall, and underneath the relief there is something else he cannot name and does not like, and it is sitting exactly where the last forty yards should have been.

You know that hill. Yours might be a suitcase on stairs, or a form somebody offered to fill in with you, or a ride to an appointment you said no to twice. And you know the thing that arrives afterward in the doorway, which is not gratitude and is not quite shame. I want to tell you what the last forty yards actually cost you.

The Strongest Moment in History Has Another Man Carrying It

You are safe here, so let me take you to a road, because there is a road in Scripture with exactly this on it.

And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.Mark 15:21

At the single most important moment in the history of the world, on the road out to the execution, the load comes off Jesus Christ and goes onto the shoulders of a man walking in from the fields who did not ask to be there. The Gospels do not tell us why. They do not say He collapsed, and I will not put words in the text that the text does not use. What they say is what happened: somebody else carried it for the last part of the road.

And nobody has ever thought less of Him for it. In two thousand years of people hunting for something to hold against Him, nobody has once said that the cross being carried by another man diminished Him. The thought is not even available.

You are not diminished by being carried, and Scripture settles that on the highest ground there is. That is not my opinion about self worth; it is what is written in Mark 15:21, where the beam changes shoulders and the dignity does not move an inch, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that off a page and lays it under a man standing in his own doorway with his hands still shaking. Whatever the last forty yards cost you, it was not that.

Now look at what Mark does with Simon's name.

He does not just say "a passerby." He gives the man's name, his city, and then, oddly, the names of his two sons. Alexander and Rufus. You do not name somebody's children unless the people reading know them, so Mark is writing to a church where those two men are apparently sitting in the room. The family of the man pressed into carrying somebody else's load ended up known, named, and written into Scripture permanently.

You are inside a story where the carrying is what gets remembered, and it is remembered honorably on both ends of the beam. His word keeps Simon's name and his sons' names in the account rather than tidying them out, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old name in a Gospel into a settled fact about a hill on a Thursday. The man from 34 is not going to think less of you. Neither does God, and God is the harder audience.

The Last Part of the Road

Let me be careful about two things now, because this is where writing like this goes wrong in one of two directions and I would like to avoid both.

The first: I am not going to tell you that saying "you're all right, nearly there" was pride. It might not have been, I was not there, and I will not sit here diagnosing a man on a hill. Wanting to carry your own washing machine up your own street to your own children is not a character flaw. Independence is not a sin and I refuse to write it as one.

The second: I am not going to tell you somebody will be there. I cannot promise you a man from number 34. Some hills are empty, and pretending otherwise is a cheap comfort that falls apart the first time nobody comes.

What I am handing you is what is settled before anybody comes or does not, which is the real question underneath. Not "will someone help." What does being helped say about me. That one has an answer, and the answer was decided on a road out of Jerusalem.

Paul writes it into how the family works: Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). That is not a rule about being nice. It is a description of the shape of the thing. Aaron and Hur held up Moses' hands at Rephidim while the battle went on below (Exodus 17:12), and nobody in the account treats Moses as having failed. They got him a stone to sit on and took an arm each. That is what the arrangement is, and always was.

You have a place in a family where the carrying goes both directions, and you did not lose your seat in it by needing the last forty yards. It is written that we bear one another's burdens and that this is how the law of Christ is fulfilled, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to be on the receiving end of that without it costing them anything. You have carried a sofa, four car batteries, two sets of shelves and somebody's dog. None of that was a payment. There was nothing to pay.

And I am keeping the frame small, because that is the honest size of this. I am not talking about the rest of your year or the rest of the hills. Tonight: a machine in the hall, three children, a doorway, and the shaking in your hands going down.

You are carried tonight, and it does not go on your account anywhere. His word says another man carried the beam behind Jesus and that bearing one another's burdens is the law of Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your grip who is holding your dignity while you stand in that doorway.