Take up Your Cross

[Our lessons were Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; and Mark 8:31-38.]

Sometimes it is tough being Peter. One moment, Jesus is calling you the rock upon which he will build his church, and in seemingly the next, he calls you Satan. Talk about moving from the heights to the depths! It says something about Peter’s faith that he persevered and stayed, in his own stumbling, human way with Jesus.

What had gotten into Peter? Human misconceptions. He had his own idea of what the Messiah would do, based upon tradition and scripture, and it sure didn’t include suffering, rejection, and death! By this point, talk of a resurrection probably went right over his head. Peter couldn’t accept that Jesus was saying that the Messiah must suffer and die instead of Peter’s more traditional expectations of Kingship, might, and victory. What Jesus was saying was that to reject suffering for the Messiah was to reject God’s plan in favor of human priorities.

Often don’t we do the exact same thing Peter did—let our own preconceptions, our prejudices, blind us to God’s will? We might not rebuke Jesus, of course; but we might not be willing to follow Jesus, if he is not heading in the way we choose.

Jesus then tells the crowd that his followers would have to take up their crosses and follow him. Just what did Jesus mean? We often speak of someone having “their own cross to bear”, usually meaning some problem or challenge they have to face. Is that what Jesus had in mind?

To a Jew in the Roman occupation, a cross meant one thing. It wasn’t an item of jewelry that you wore. It wasn’t an object that you put on the wall of a church. A cross was the way the Empire executed criminals. It was an object lesson to anyone who dared to oppose the might of Rome: you would die publically, shamefully over several days. Crosses were placed in large numbers at the crossroads to provide an object lesson to anyone who would dare challenge Caesar. In 6 CE, the young Jesus could see 2,000 Galilean insurrectionists crucified by the Romans. When Jesus was talking about picking up a cross, he meant the real thing! And for many of his disciples and many early Christians, following Jesus did lead to their own deaths, sometimes on actual crosses.

While picking up our own cross is no trivial thing, it usually will not lead in our executions. But there are no guarantees, even in our time. In our own lifetimes, we learn of martyrs who have knowingly accepted their own deaths in carrying the Cross. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe from the Nazis, Jonathan Myrick Daniels in Alabama, and Archbishops Jawani Luwum in Uganda and Óscar Romero in El Salvador show us that martyrdom is not only a feature of history.

Taking up our Cross is not automatically a call to martyrdom. God does not want or need another drop of blood shed in His name. God calls us to be the Body of Christ, praying that His Kingdom will come and His will be done here as in heaven. Jesus taught us to seek the Kingdom of God—a place where God’s justice is done, the hungry are fed, and death itself has no more dominion. Jesus doesn't so much want us to die as he did as to live as he did.

Jesus also tells the crowd that followers of Jesus must deny their selves and lose their lives. That was hard to take then, but I suspect it’s even harder in 21st Century America with our near idolatry of individuality and self-realization. When cable commentators are cheered for their unwillingness to help others in need with words like “Why should I help losers?” it’s clear that “self” reigns, not God.

Here in America our relative wealth and education comes with privilege and give us power. Jesus calls us to use that which we have, not for ourselves, but for those who have less than we do. If we are serious about denying our selves, can we do any less?