Can a Musical Walk Down the Via Dolorosa Both Lift and Unite Us?
- Rebecca Burnham
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
I learned about the Rev. Henry Masters’ “Simon of Cyrene: The Musical” on Good Friday. I was wanting to post my own poem "Cyrenian" on FaceBook and I needed to create an AI image to go with it. The image I wanted to post, a painting by Liz Lemon Swindle, is not publicly available but I had noticed that it depicts Simon as a Black man and I wondered if that was accurate. Where was Cyrene? I learned it was a Greek colony in Libya. So was Simon Greek or African? I did a Google Search that convinced me he was probably African, while connecting me to an article about a recently retired Methodist pastor who staged a musical about him in 2022. I was intrigued and, since we just celebrated Easter, I wanted to write this week’s newsletter about it. Rev. Masters graciously made time for me yesterday and I’m both humbled and eager to share with you what I learned about his project.
The Rev. Henry Masters literally wrote the book on Simon of Cyrene. Also, his doctoral thesis, when he focused his Doctorate of Ministry studies on the African presence in the Bible. But it’s his musical that pulled me in and has me thinking in new ways about Jesus Christ, the experience of African Americans, and the necessity of grappling together with slavery’s sordid history in order to bring it all into the light of redeeming love.
I am not the audience Rev. Masters was primarily aiming to reach. His primary purpose was to reach people of his own race and help them see themselves in the story of Jesus’ suffering, crucifixion and resurrection. He had a particular goal “to demonstrate to other Black boys and men how God works miracles to turn circumstances and situations into God-honoring destinies.” But just watching a 14 minute trailer both choked me up and helped me to see the connection he wanted to highlight for them, in a way that deepens my understanding and my grief about racial relations in the past and present.
Is deepened grief a good thing? Can musical theatre lift and unite us at the same time that it causes us grief. I think it can and often must. We need to see where we’re wrong, and feel for the harms we’ve caused or contributed to, before we become willing to accept the invitation to move to higher ground, together. That’s a big part of lifting and uniting.
So first, I want to give a brief history about the Rev. Masters’ life and his treatment of Simon of Cyrene. Then I want to talk about how my limited exposure to this has affected me.
The Rev. Henry Masters
Henry Masters, 76, grew up during the Jim Crow period in a Black community (ironically named White City) just outside of Waco Texas. His childhood was generally happy though they walked on eggshells regarding race relations. “We were taught to always be obedient, not only to elders but also, specifically to be obedient and respectful to white people because of the fear that disrespecting them could land us in considerable trouble, as well as our families. So we tried to stay clear of any kind of racial situation,” he recalls.
When he was a teenager, he had an experience that has become chilling in retrospect, especially since the Netflix series When They See Us. He was playing dominoes in a café when a couple police officers entered, picked him out from the group, and escorted him outside to a waiting police car. They showed him to the young, white woman in the backseat and asked, “Is he the one.”
She said no, and they released him. But, in those days, if she’d mistaken him for someone else, her word would have been enough to establish his guilt. “All through my life, I’ve been reflective of how that situation could have been a tragic turning point,” he says.
Simon of Cyrene
After graduating high school, Masters studied first at an all-Black college, then experienced integrated education for the first time while studying theology at Southern Methodist University. There, he became interested in literature and discovered Harlem poet Countee Cullen’s poem “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks”.
He never spoke a word to me,
And yet He called my name;
He never gave a sign to me,
And yet I knew and came.
At first I said, "I will not bear
His cross upon my back;
He only seeks to place it there
Because my skin is black."
But He was dying for a dream,
And He was very meek,
And in His eyes there shone a gleam
Men journey far to seek.
It was Himself my pity bought;
I did for Christ alone
What all of Rome could not have wrought
With bruise of lash or stone.
That poem launched a life-long interest in the one who bore Jesus’ cross, whom Masters believes was picked out by soldiers from the crowd because of his dark skin. We don't know his ethnicity for certain. Simon’s skin-color is never mentioned in the Bible, but his hailing from Africa is highlighted by each of the three gospel writers who mention him. That seems significant. Others, including Billy Graham, have also identified him as Black.
Masters published a book about him in 2004, but he wanted to take the story further and employ the power of music to bring the story to life. “Music is such a natural and integral part of African American cultural life,” he explains.
So he created a musical, interwoven with readings to drive the messages home. The cast was drawn from his United Methodist congregation in Dallas, plus Malcolm Payne Jr. an opera singer with Dallas and Fort Worth Operas, who played Jesus. They performed during Lenten in 2022, then took a film of the production on the road to large crowds in Houston, Waco and Los Angeles.
The 14-minute trailer shared with me includes both scenes from the musical and portions of the readings. I watched expecting to be pulled into a fictionalized account of Simon’s backstory and how he allowed the assistance he was compelled to give Jesus to transform him into a disciple. There was some of that there. But there was a whole lot more, some of which challenged me.
Staying Woke
For example, there was a song and reading about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, urging his disciples to “watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation” (Matthew 26:41). The song used different words: “Stay woke.” The reading pointed out, “Before Al Sharpton, Jesus said, ‘stay woke.’ Before Jesse Jackson, Jesus said, ‘stay woke.’ Before the Congressional Black Caucus, before the NAACP, before Black Lives Matter, Jesus said, ‘stay woke.’”
I live in a very conservative community where “woke” is a word that is used pejoratively. It’s not uncommon to hear comments like “those woke people will say anything.” As it falls from the mouths of my conservative friends, and even in a recent Instagram reel of my own, “woke” means something like: abrasively and unreasonably protective of an approved, liberal narrative, regardless of the facts.
But that is not the history of the word. The first known audio-clip of the phrase “stay woke” was in Lead Belly’s 1938 commentary on his song about the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women, subsequently convicted by all-white juries, and sentenced to death, only to eventually be exonerated after more than 100 years of collective unjust imprisonment. Lead Belly explains the purpose of his song was to “advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through Alabama - stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
That sounds to me a lot more like “watch and pray” than “bully people into using your language and supporting your narrative”.
The phrase continued to be used in Black vernacular, although Martin Luther King used the concept, not the words, when he urged listeners to “remain awake through a great revolution” in 1965. The concept of wokeness conveyed staying alert and focused on a better world, not lulled away into a false sense of security. Over time, progressives who were sensitized to issues of inequality started talking about being woke, regardless of their racial background. And now it is used pejoratively by conservatives.
But when I think about how the term shows up in Masters’ musical, I hear a need to examine myself. As a Christian, my heart responds to Jesus asking his disciples to watch and pray with him, while he goes to pray in an agony that will cause him to sweat blood from every pore. And I relate to their wanting to, but falling asleep anyway. I wonder about the ways I’ve allowed myself to become desensitized or asleep to those who are suffering a stone’s throw away from me. What about the ways that I may be tempted to lash out against perceived enemies, like Peter would do just a little later, when he cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant? If I think of “stay woke” as meaning “watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation,” the political rhetoric (and all its attendant excuses) falls away, and I’m left with an exhortation to see and treat everyone around me like I would want to treat Jesus.
Connections between the Cross and the Lynch Tree
Next, there was the singing of “Strange Fruit” (about lynchings in the Southern States) with an interpretive dance while Jesus hung on the cross. The reading noted more than 3,445 lynchings of Black men in America from 1882 to 1968. It referenced James H Cone’s book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and this quote from it: “The conscious absence of lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is especially revealing as the crucifixion was a first century lynching.”
I had never connected those images. The commentary is compelling, especially while the Ku Klux Klan misappropriates the image of the cross. It is also compelling considering the conversation that happens between Jesus and Simon as they walk along the Via Dolorosa and Jesus affirms his resolve to fulfill his calling, despite the injustice. It is compelling as he hangs on the cross, with detractors telling him to save himself. There is an invitation to respond to injustice, betrayal and even torture, with courage and an unswerving commitment to love and to honour God, whatever the cost. Does it take us backwards to invoke images of lynchings, when talking about the crucifixion of Jesus? Does it put a chip on people’s shoulders? Wouldn’t it be better to leave those horrific abuses in the past and start fresh in order to move forward together?
Why the Past Matters
I find my answer to that by looking into my own experience. When I have been able to connect painful personal ordeals and betrayal by someone I loved, with Jesus’ experiences, it has given me courage and a resolve to behave consistent with his teachings, while drawing me closer to him. It has allowed me to heal. As far as leaving the past alone and starting fresh goes, I have attempted to resolve a relationship with someone who had abused me, only to find they were unwilling to acknowledge the past abuse. That was history they didn’t want to revisit. This only signalled to me that nothing had changed and it was not safe to trust.
Rev. Masters is now pondering on next steps for his musical. He feels a call to do something at a time when “there are those who want to take books and resources off the shelves that were meant to educate people about slavery, what it meant, and implications for today.” When there are efforts to put a spin on history, he sees Black churches having a role to “push forward in helping to give grounding to our communities about the importance of our history.” He mentions the “Slave Bible,” published in London in 1807 in the hopes of preventing a slave revolt in the West Indies by Christianizing slaves, while not giving them any dangerous ideas about being delivered out of captivity. “When they got through [removing all the problematic passages] they had 10% of the Old Testament and 50% of the New Testament.” Today, only three copies of the Slave Bible still exist. Rev. Masters has held the copy that’s in the keeping of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He says, “there are some eerie parallels to that story that are finding their way in our present-day culture.”
Simon of Cyrene: The Musical is one tool he hopes to use to combat that movement, and to empower people of his community to process their ancestor’s traumas as well as their own, in a cross-bearing walk with Jesus. For myself, because just the small portions I watched challenged me, it is clear that I need to participate in that walk as well, and process the issues too. I believe that musical theatre should lift and unite us. And sometimes, that means it also needs to shake us up and open our eyes.
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