How to Be An Awesome Minor Character, Part 1

It’s all about the hero’s journey.  A call to adventure, discovery, an epic battle, transformation, return to normal life.  We are all warriors, and God is writing our epic story.  We are the heroes, and the center of the universe… oh wait.  Maybe not the center of the universe, but pretty central, anyway.  At least, for me, everything I am involved in, I am there (unless I have fallen asleep or am daydreaming).

            When we read the Bible, we look for ourselves in it, how God has predestined us or chosen us before the foundations of the universe, and how we are to become all that we can be.  It’s typically on an individual level, this looking for ourselves in the Bible.  Our individual promises.  Our individual call to destiny.

            Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we don’t have an awesome, amazing identity in Christ.  I am not saying we don’t have an individual relationship with the Creator of the Universe.  A personal relationship and understanding and experience of God’s love are central to the Christian experience.  But not many people take a moment to think that perhaps the story that we are involved in doesn’t center around us.  Perhaps we are not the main characters.  Perhaps we are the supporting characters.  The important minor character in someone else’s story, set there to change the course of their lives.

            I am not undermining each person’s individual life.  I am not saying God isn’t writing a story in each of us and that each person doesn’t have a purpose.  But I am challenging the “all about me” perspective that I have too.  What if it is not about you or I.  What if the main character is supposed to be Jesus?

            I’ve recently read Luke Chapter 2.  The first part is the very familiar Christmas story about the angels appearing to shepherds keeping their flocks in the fields at night, Mary is treasuring things in her heart.  It’s a long chapter, and my Bible at least breaks it up at verse 22 into another story about Jesus being presented in the temple.

            I don’t know about you, but there is not one, but there are two incredible minor characters in this story about Jesus that absolutely blow my mind.

            Luke 2:25- 28 (with 28 abbreviated) says:

25And there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel; and the Holy Spirit was upon him. 26And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. 27And he came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to carry out for Him the custom of the Law, 28then he took Him into his arms, and blessed God…

           

            All Simeon does in this story is tell Joseph and Mary a few things that amaze them, perhaps to encourage them in the difficult path they are walking.  Joseph, maybe, might have struggled inwardly at the public humiliation of marrying a wife who was pregnant out-of-wedlock, and Mary at this point might have wondered if she really saw an angel of the Lord (at least, I might have started doubting after changing Jesus’s nappies for so long).  Who really knows what was going on in their minds.  All we know is that Luke, a believing physician, thought to record a few words spoken by a man named Simeon, and we never hear about Simeon again (at least not to my knowledge).

            There are a few cool things about Simeon as a minor character that strike me as a writer.  Simeon was known to be righteous and devout—a lifestyle that takes more than just attending a few meetings at the synagogue or local church, or thinking in your head occasionally that you think God is real.  This minor character Simeon lived a life that was purposefully seeking after the Lord, which takes time and commitment and sometimes many years of it.  The other thing that strikes me about Simeon is that he is one of the first people in Jesus’s life to be described as having the Holy Spirit.

              I haven’t really done a study on this, perhaps it’s just merely a way that Luke chose to describe the fact that Simeon had communion with the spirit of God, as I know Jesus says later on in his life that he has to leave so his disciples would receive the Holy Spirit.  All I know is that he “came in the Spirit” to the temple, he was willing to be led by God’s promptings in his comings and goings and then he spoke a prophetic word over God-in-the-flesh that came true! 

Not only that, but he had incredible faith to believe that he would see the Messiah before he died, even before he had any concrete reason to believe so.  This man, who probably took only a few moments of Jesus’s physical time on earth, had such an incredible backstory that were captured in a few sentences in the story of the main man, Jesus.  One could use their imagination to think of how many less-amazing versions of the story we could have had.
              Each one of us can take pointers from Simeon’s example to be the best minor character in God’s story that we can be.