I'm not sure why Father went there because, in my mind, he opened a can of worms ...

He mentioned the absence of Simon of Cyrene¹ in the passion account we read at 3 today. He tried to answer the logical question of why John left him out, assuming, I suppose that he was there, helping Jesus carry the cross, as the Synoptics and the "popular" Stations of the Cross indicate.

It's easy enough to admit that John simply left Simon out but that doesn't address the larger question of how Jesus got to Calvary. Was he stumbling and falling or was he so self-possessed that he yielded his spirit only after all was finished?

But this question starts in the Garden (of Gethsemane), if not earlier.

I'm not much of a fan of homogenizing Scripture, especially the Gospels. Whoever thunk up Gospel harmonies was trying too hard. Scripture says what it says. Let's not ponder over wise men and shepherds or two Temple cleansings.

But, in this case, can't we have both Christs? Isn't this the two natures, later defined dogmatically, clearly in evidence?

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¹ The Fourth Gospel isn't really late enough to take on full-blown Christian Gnosticism, but certainly some early christological heresies, like Docetism, could have used the figure of Simon of Cyrene as a stand-in for Christ at the crucifixion, as the Wiki article suggests.

This is parodied in Life of Brian briefly, fleetingly, but watching the film, I never associated the gag with a misappropriated Cyrenian tradition until just now.