Simon of Cyrene

Scripture: Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26; Romans 16:13; Acts 2:10; 6:9; 11:20; 13:1

Cyrene was a Greek city on the North African coast in the region now called Libya, and it held one of the largest Jewish diaspora communities in the Mediterranean world. Cyrenian Jews had their own synagogue in Jerusalem, Acts 6:9 names "the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), and of the Cyrenians" among those who disputed with Stephen. Lucius of Cyrene appears among the prophets and teachers at Antioch (Acts 13:1). Men from Cyrene were among those who first preached the gospel to Gentiles at Antioch (Acts 11:20). The Cyrenian Jewish community was woven into the early church from its first days. Simon of Cyrene was not a random passerby; he was almost certainly in Jerusalem for Passover, a Jew of the diaspora who had made the pilgrimage, or perhaps one of the diaspora Jews who had returned to live near the holy city.

All three Synoptic Gospels record Simon's conscription, and each adds a slightly different detail. Matthew 27:32: "As they went out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. They compelled this man to carry his cross." Luke 23:26: "And as they led him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus." Mark 15:21 is the most detailed: "And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross." The Greek verb in Matthew is ēggareusan (ἠγγάρευσαν), the technical term for military impressment, the right of a Roman soldier to compel a civilian to carry a load for one Roman mile (Matthew uses the same word in 5:41: "if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two"). This was not a request. Simon was seized in the street, a farming man coming in from the fields in the morning or midday, and handed the cross of a man the Romans were executing. He had no choice.

Mark's parenthetical, "the father of Alexander and Rufus", is extraordinary and is found in no other Gospel. Mark wrote first and wrote for the church in Rome. He named Simon's sons, and he named them without explanation. This means Mark's Roman readers already knew who Alexander and Rufus were. You do not introduce the father of two unknown men to an audience that doesn't know the sons. You name a father by his children when the children are already known to the reader. Alexander and Rufus were figures in the Roman church, people the audience could identify from the mention alone.

Paul, writing to Rome in Romans 16, greeted "Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine" (Romans 16:13). The phrase "his mother and mine" is remarkable: Paul called Rufus's mother his own mother, meaning she had been to Paul what a mother is, a woman who had cared for him with maternal love, housed him, looked after him in some period of his life. If the Rufus of Romans 16 is the Rufus of Mark 15, the son of Simon who carried the cross, then the man who was conscripted to carry Christ's cross on the road to Golgotha became the father of a woman Paul called "mother." The cross-bearer's family became part of Paul's own spiritual family and was known in the church at Rome by name. The coincidence cannot be confirmed with certainty, but it is precisely the kind of coincidence the New Testament allows to sit without over-explaining, and the Roman context of both texts makes it historically plausible.

Nothing more is recorded of Simon himself. We do not know whether he was already a follower of Jesus, or whether he came to faith through what he witnessed on the road to Golgotha, or when or how. The Gospels are silent after the moment of conscription. But his name was preserved. His sons were named. His family was known in Rome. YHWH pressed this Cyrenian into the last mile of the road to the cross, and what his family became afterward is written in the margins of the text.

In the Sanctum, Simon of Cyrene is the man who did not volunteer, did not choose, and is not recorded as saying a word, and whose name is nonetheless preserved across three Gospels and whose sons were known to the Roman church. He represents every person YHWH has conscripted into a moment they did not seek: pressed into proximity with the cross not by faith but by force, and kept there long enough for something permanent to take root in the family that followed him.