Take up your cross (but you probably won't)

Mark 8:27-9:8

The disciples in Mark are very stupid. Have you ever noticed this? It’s as if Jesus goes out of his way to collect average dunderheads and entrust them as his confidants and as the future of the faith post-crucifixion. Not only were these guys fishermen and tax collectors and various tradesmen, meaning they weren’t the best Bible students, they weren’t high-class, and they weren’t gifted in the way we generally talk about giftedness, but they also show it by continually misunderstanding who Jesus was and what he was up to.

Peter isn’t necessarily the worst about this but he is the most vocal so he tends to come out looking pretty bad. Jesus openly tells the disciples about his death and his resurrection—and let’s remember, this is the Jesus whom the disciples have been following and who they’ve seen not just heal the sick but raise the dead—but still they cannot make the leap of faith necessary to believe that somebody who could raise other dead people could himself be raised. Or, I guess, they just don’t want to see Jesus that way.

See, the disciples are good people, maybe simple people but good people, and they just don’t want Jesus to suffer and die. Their fault is their compassion, which is interesting, because Jesus calls them to a different kind of compassion. For most of us this is the hardest lesson, because it goes like this: It’s not enough to wish that somebody does not suffer, as Christians we are ordered to suffer with them. “Take up your cross and follow,” Jesus says. That is the true root of compassion—“passio”, Latin for suffer, and “com”, Latin for with—“suffer with.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer took this passage as his guiding principle while imprisoned in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. He wrote, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple he bids him come and die.” That’s the end result of picking up your cross. We tend to minimize it—like our children are our cross to bear, or our work is our cross to bear, or our terrible football team is our cross to bear—but that’s not enough. It’s the things that kill you that are your true crosses, and sometimes that might be your children—we’re getting kind of close there—but it’s even darker than that. It’s the things that seem to have no redeeming value whatsoever. “Take up your cross and follow” is the hardest commandment, and yet the most central to the life of being a disciple; the life to which all of us are called.

So, I’m going to be frank, none of you do this very well, and I don’t expect much of that to change. I don’t do this very well myself. To pick up our cross is directly opposed to everything we do on a regular basis in our lives. To pick up your cross is to be anti-security, anti-comfort, anti-protectionism, anti-self-preservation, anti-you. It’s to suffer seemingly without purpose. So it’s easy to make excuses not to go that way: How will my suffering spread the Gospel? Surely God needs us to be beacons of shining positivity in order to draw people to him! And how will dying serve any greater purpose? What if we just suffer and die ignominiously and nobody knows about it? How will that advance the kingdom of God?

All of those excuses (and that's exactly what they are) are great reminders that THIS. IS. NOT. ABOUT. YOU. This is the opposite of the self-help you hear all the time on a daily basis. The ones who truly try to live this philosophy—I think of people like Mother Theresa—are mostly anonymous and poor and not particularly well-respected even after their deaths, if they’re noticed at all. You won’t be Mother Theresa, you won’t be Jesus; most of us will just be like the disciples, kind of clueless, even when Jesus is standing in right front of us. So, that’s the bad news: You probably aren’t going to live up to the life that Jesus expects of you.

The good news is that Jesus’ faithfulness is far more important than ours anyway. When Jesus takes up his cross he does it on behalf of all of us, so that when we inevitably choose a road toward glory rather than suffering we have a Messiah who has been there first.

None of this is an excuse. It’s a reminder, actually, that you cannot be righteous without A) taking up your cross and dying, or B) having Jesus do it for you. That should be a lesson in humility, because either you’re dying or you aren’t being a Christian.

So, I’m sorry to break this to all our terrible candidates for president of the United States, but the only Christian way to govern is to take up your cross, and I guarantee you that the candidate who runs on the platform of walking a road of suffering and death is not getting elected. Instead, they’re probably just getting crucified. What do you mean we can’t put a dime into defense?

However, we do have to be careful here, because the command from Jesus comes to us personally—not to be cast aside onto other folks. Take up your cross. Don’t worry about whether your neighbor is doing the same, because they aren’t and, frankly, you aren’t either. You’re missing the point of this. We are very good at passing on blame. Yes, I could have maybe done a little more, but compared to so-and-so I’m a pretty darn good Christian!

It doesn’t work that way. Pick up your cross, or nothing at all. And since you don’t you had better trust in the grace of God, because that’s all you have. The disciples are dumb. They don’t get it, but we should probably give them a little bit of a break because we aren’t all that smart either. Not when our lives are relatively nice. The funny thing is that some people do understand what this means, and they are the people living with truly senseless suffering. It’s why the words of Bonhoeffer mean something because from the vantage point of the concentration camp the Christian life of discipleship comes into focus. This religion we practice is for people who are actually oppressed; not faking it, like Target is oppressing me by not greeting me with “Merry Christmas.” No, actual, you’re-killing-me oppression. This kind of oppression is still very real in our world, and that is where we find Jesus. Not, primarily, here.

Which is kind of the scary part, actually. Jesus comes to we who have much last of all. I mean, Jesus came for everybody. That’s true. It’s just that we think we need him less. It’s possible here in this place to go about our lives and not have to answer existential questions day in and day out, to not scavenge for cast away food, or to bemoan the fact that we’re watching the Super Bowl on a TV that’s only 50-something inches. If that is our oppression Jesus is far from here indeed.

Instead, the disciples of Christ work in rice paddies in Cambodia and slums in Tijuana and in refugee camps in Syria. They’re the ones ready to hear the words, “Take up your cross and follow” as a realistic order to give their life worth. Jesus came for the littlest, the lost, the lowly, the last, and the dead. He doesn’t show much interest in us.

That is, until suffering creeps into our sugar-coated reality. The one place where we are all united is death, and one day we will all go there, and that’s partly why Jesus talks about a great leveling, because life is not how we suppose. We imagine that the ones who are rich are the ones with money and the ones who are powerful are the ones with political stature, but instead Jesus shows us the way to value in God’s eyes, which is the way of the cross, which is that the wealthy are those who suffer, the powerful are those who are oppressed, and there is no greater power in the world than self-sacrificial love. That is something that no political authority, no wealthy magnate, no principality or power can come to apart from losing everything. It’s why Jesus tells that rich man to go and give it all away; it’s not enough to give the excess—you must give it all. There is his cross to bear—actual suffering, not minor inconvenience.

This is tough business, honestly. This scripture condemns us like it did the disciples. The good news is that the disciples stick with it, and so should we. Each of the disciples eventually dies—eleven of the twelve are killed by principalities and powers because of their faith, Judas Iscariot hangs himself, and only one, John, lives to old age. They discover their own crosses in time, and so will you. You will die, and I wonder in that moment of death, held in God’s hands, if we won’t realize why the way to God is suffering, that we give too much credit to death; that a better life is one spent without power.

This is about trusting in God not to give us a good life, but to show us the good life is not what we think. Most of the time most of us do not really care for these words, but there will come a time when you’re without comfort, without security, without family, without resources, and you’re facing the fact that you aren’t able to save yourself. Then you will discover your cross. These are words for the least, the last, the littlest and the dead. Someday they will be words for you, too.