This movement in Bach's St Matthew passion is the point where Simon is commanded to help Jesus carry the cross.

The compositional style gives deep insights into Lutheran theology. It is also a very rare example of Bach's writing where he enacts physical struggle to music, and makes the music behave as though a body is struggling to move. It is almost grotesque, body horror like, in its rendition of physical weakness. The violist here even looks like someone struggling to carry a cross - their four note phrases actually drawing out crosses on the musical stave (Cross motif).

Consider the opening words:

Komm, süßes Kreuz, so will ich sagen. Come, sweet cross, thus will I say.

The cross is not sweet because pain is good in itself, nor because suffering earns salvation.

Bach does not musically argue that the cross is sweet. He makes the listener experience how it might be sweet to the person who bears it in faith. The music does not float above suffering, rather trudges through it. It finds beauty in bearing it. The viola seems to enact the pitiful stumbling and struggling Jesus must have made carrying his cross to Golgotha. The more we feel the physical indignity of the Passion, the more weight the theological paradox acquires.

In the context of Christ's passion, the sweetness has a real source. The very cross that Simon is compelled to carry is the cross on which Christ will accomplish the redemption of the world.

The sweetness of the cross is not a sweetness of sensation. It is a sweetness of salvation.

Are there any melodies that Bach harmonized for more than one chorale?