Many who were closely involved in the life of Jesus of Nazareth appear just occasionally in the narrative of the four Gospels. Some slip quietly across the stage, whilst a few show up only at the end. Others are aggressively active throughout his three years’ ministry even though we may not read much about them until they are centre stage. At the start, they are all strangers to each other and what brought them together was the shadow and the reality of the Cross, Rome’s most humiliating and excruciating instrument of execution. Here is an attempt to understand these diverse characters. To try their minds and appreciate their response to the one who challenged their lives. Some resolutely refused to acknowledge him as anything more than ‘Jesus of Nazareth’—they never rose above this and remained for ever Strangers at the Cross. Others came to a deeper understanding of who this man was, in some cases after only a brief but dramatic interaction with him—but at the close these were no longer Strangers at the Cross.
