Good Friday confronts us with a different kind of violence. Not only the machinery of empire, but the quieter, more familiar force of anonymity. In Mark’s Gospel, the cross is surrounded by a crowd described only as “they.” No names. No responsibility. Just a chorus of passing voices.

This sermon explores what happens when suffering becomes spectacle. When humiliation is carried out not by a single villain, but by a diffuse, indifferent crowd. The ones passing by have somewhere else to be. Their mockery costs them nothing. And yet, it is exactly this casual distance that allows the cross to happen.

Against this backdrop, one figure is named. Simon of Cyrene. A passerby who is pulled into the story, forced to carry what he did not choose. In a moment shaped by anonymity, he becomes visible.

Good Friday does not ask whether you would have volunteered for the cross. It asks something smaller, and harder. When you find yourself near someone else’s suffering, will you disappear into the crowd, or will you remain?

You are not a they. You are known.