Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will
lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
[Matthew 16:24-25]
This is from the Gospel
lesson for next Sunday. You will find
the same passage in all three synoptic gospels.
About the only significant difference is in Luke, where Jesus says we
are to take up our cross daily… as though he means each morning, anew.
I cannot think that in a grown-up
spiritual journey we are to understand our “cross” as turning us into any of
life’s victims. We have all met the people
who daily, visibly and audibly carry their cross, wearing it like an identity
badge of honour. An old song I cannot
track down has someone, on being asked how they are today, replying, “Quite
well, thank you, for the state I’m in.” Most
people, we suppose, have hardships of one kind or another… or have had, or will
have… and often those loads can indeed be heavy to unbearable. St Paul says we are to bear the loads of others and so fulfil the law of Christ.[1]
When Jesus speaks of the cross in this
context, he is acknowledging just that -- that life is no trivial matter, often
an arduous journey, for every person.
Whoever we are, we encounter burdens of hope and disappointment, or it
may be fear and insecurity… burdens of parenthood, or of living alone… burdens
of grief and memory… burdens of illness and incapacity. Luke perhaps was the one who saw that simply
getting up in the morning is to reassume sometimes heavy loads of
responsibility or weariness, or worse.
Simply being human and alive, and with a sober estimate of our own
limited capacities as well as of the loads others are bearing, is what Jesus
calls the cross.
And he sees this burden transformed by
the gifts of faith and love. My yoke is easy, said Jesus, my burden is light.[2] He was bitterly critical of the legalists in
religion, the scribes and pharisees, precisely because… they tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders
of others.[3] We carry our cross daily, as pilgrims, livers
of life, in company with Jesus, and sustained by the disciplines we personally
find meaningful, such as the prayer of silence and stillness.
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