Take up your cross. . .

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” These are the word spoken by Christ to his disciples that are sandwiched in between Peter’s confession of Christ and the transfiguration if Christ in the gospel of Luke.  They are such powerful and gruesome words, imagine being one of the disciples who were with Christ on that day he uttered these words. First Peter announces that Jesus is “the Christ of God,” then Jesus tells them that this Christ guy that Peter speaks of is going to suffer, and that in turn his followers are going to suffer, and then it is revealed that He truly is the Christ through the transfiguration. It's quite an eventful time in the life of the disciples. But in finding the Christ, they are told that they are going to suffer.

Now think of what the image of the cross was in the minds of these disciples. To Christ’s Followers today, the cross is an image of love. To Christ’s Followers in 30 C.E. the cross was a gruesome image of death and humiliation. The disciples would have never been caught dead wearing a cross around their necks or hanging them in their houses. As someone once said, “To a disciple, seeing someone wear a cross around their neck would be like us seeing someone wearing an electric chair around their neck.” Maybe the image that Mel Gibson gave us in “The Passion of the Christ” can help us understand what the image of the cross would have been to the disciples.

Now fast forward to today, but the today that happened approximately 1,975 years ago (give or take a few years). The disciples had to stand by and watch their beloved leader being beaten, whipped, flogged, mocked, humiliated, and ultimately killed in one of, if not the most brutal of fashions ever available. I have a feeling that the words Jesus uttered back on the day that Peter confessed Jesus as Lord may have entered the minds of the disciples during all of the chaos. I also have a feeling that they might have thought something like this; “umm, this is what we are called to do on a daily basis!” Maybe they wanted to take the same approach that Lone Star and Barf took when they saw what they were about to get into in Space Balls.

Fortunately for many of us, the cross that we carry allows us to skip the physical atrocities that Jesus unjustly had to suffer from the religious and political powers.  Most of us get to carry a cross more similar to the one the apostle John carried, (according to Christian tradition, John was the only disciple not killed for his faith), one that will not result in physical punishment. Instead he was ostracized and sent to exile on an island. Like John, sometimes we are going to be ostracized for our faith. Sometimes it will come from secular sources, sometimes from other religious sources, sometimes it will come from even inside our own religious tradition. I remember getting angry with a group of Christ Followers who took out a page ad in my local newspaper urging for peaceful responses after 9/11. At the time I thought they were idiots, I am sure others thought the same, maybe they used other words. But the point is this, these men and women were ostracized for their faith. However, in retrospect, all that these people were trying to do was to follow the teachings of Christ to their fullness, thru loving even their most disliked neighbors (as the Good Samaritan did), and by turning the other cheek to their oppressors. For this group of Christ followers:  love was their cross, peace was their cross, and Christ was their cross.

 In short, the crosses that Christ Followers carry on a daily basis are the teachings and actions of Christ. We carry teachings and actions which are counter to the culture that we live in; teachings and actions which are seen by the culture as being foolish. Many times, by carrying and holding onto these teachings, others are going to ostracize us. They are going to call us names; they are going to claim that we are bad Americans, even bad Christians! And despite the old limerick, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” names do hurt. Names are painful. Names have a powerful effect on a person; they can make them angry, they can make them sad, they can make them hurt. But there is Good News!  A Good News that is unknown to those who continue to persecute the disciples of Christ. That good news is this; resurrection is just around the corner!