After the passage emphasizes the suffering Jesus chose to endure for his followers (vv. 11, 14, 34), we might expect at least some of his followers to share his cross—as he had called them all to do (16:24). But the soldiers had to draft a bystander instead—putting to shame all the claims we disciples make about how committed we are (26:33-35). The unfaithfulness of the disciples underlines Jesus' faithfulness all the more.

Normally a condemned prisoner carried his own patibulum, or transverse beam of the cross, to the site of the execution, where soldiers would fix it to an upright stake (palus, stipes, staticulum) that they regularly reused for executions (R. Brown 1994:913). It was unlikely that the soldiers would simply show mercy. Jesus was probably too weak to carry the cross (perhaps exhausted in part from Gethsemane—26:38); his executioners preferred to have him alive on the cross than dead on the way. In such circumstances, the soldiers would naturally draft a bystander rather than carry the beam themselves (see comment on 5:41). Whether Simon was from an ethnically African family converted to Judaism or one of the many Jewish families settled in Cyrene is unclear.