Take up your cross and follow (Lent 2)

 Mark 8: 31-38

We can have phrases in the Bible which are so familiar – yet when we stop to think about it, we might wonder what, exactly, they mean.

This is one of them :

Jesus said ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’.

What does Jesus mean? ‘Take up your cross’ – and what might his first hearers have thought?

We are used to seeing the cross as a familiar symbol of our faith.

Just this week, as I was having my hair cut, Emily, who was cutting my hair, noticed the cross I was wearing and pointed out her own. It belonged to her grandmother, who has now died, and was given to her Nan as an anniversary present by her grandfather. She said ‘I love to have it, to remember them both by. Their faith meant a lot to them, and its lovely to have it right here’ (at which point she patted her chest).

For us today, a cross can be an identifying mark, a badge of belonging, a family treasure, a bringer of comfort.

But Jesus’ first disciples and the whole crowd he is addressing at this point, would have been shocked and appalled to hear Jesus talking about the cross as something someone would choose – and they would be astonished to see us wearing them today.

At the time of Jesus, the cross was a means of state execution for the worst criminals; introduced by the occupying Roman army to keep down the local population. It was a sign to everyone of torture, horror and shameful death. The nearest I think we can get to the sense of revulsion they would have had about the cross would have been how we might feel about a hangman’s noose, or an executioner’s axe and block.

It took the Christian church over 400 years to even begin to use the cross as a Christian symbol.

For Jesus to encourage his followers to deny themselves, take up a cross and follow him was a very strong message indeed. Jesus was asking his followers to accept that they should follow Jesus in accepting God the Father’s will for them and that they should set aside their own wishes, even if that meant dying a horrible death.

But that doesn’t mean that Jesus is expecting his followers to be masochists, who seek suffering and persecution.

Just before Jesus tells people to take up their cross and follow, he makes it clear that his path lies in the direction of Jerusalem, and conflict and death. 

Jesus says, quite openly ‘that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed…’

No wonder Peter wants to argue with Jesus. This is a strange way to encourage his disciples to follow him.

But Jesus makes it as plain as it can be that his path is one of self-sacrifice (in fact this is the first of 3 times that Jesus speaks of his imminent death in these middle chapters of Mark’s gospel.).

Jesus rebukes Peter for trying to change his course “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus sets divine things - the will of God the Father  - above human things - his own self-interest, even though it means death. And then Jesus sets his followers the same challenge. All who follow Jesus are to seek God’s way and God’s rule in their lives.

But Jesus does not just talk only his death – he says he will killed, and after three days rise again. He is just as clear about his resurrection as he is about his death.

So when Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he is not talking about pointless self-mutilation, but purposeful sacrifice, who God the Father will transform into honour and glory.

When we deny ourselves and taking up our cross we are not saying ‘we don’t matter’, and Jesus is not asking for us to annihilate ourselves. 

He is calling us to allow the will of God to be done, so that our selfishness dies. For Jesus, self-preservation was not so important as fulfilling God’s purpose, and he calls his disciples to follow him in denying themselves in pursuit of God’s purposes.

Alexei Navalny is an example of this kind of self-denial.

Nalvalny has been in our news as an opponent of president Putin, who has just died having been imprisoned in a harsh ‘corrective colony’ inside the Arctic circle. 

He was poisoned in August 2020, with the nerve-agent novichok, and medically evacuated to Berlin for treatment, but he chose to return to Russia, despite the danger to his life, to continue his opposition to the Russian political regime.

In a 2022 documentary about his life he said:

“If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong. We need to utilise this power to not give up, to remember that we are a huge power being oppressed by these bad dudes.”

Navalny was originally an atheist, but became a Christian – a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. He said this made him feel part of something large and universal. It certainly gave him the inspiration to lay down his life for the greater good.

For Navalny, having meaning in his life made any suffering bearable, and he was unafraid to face death, believing firmly in the resurrection of Christ and the promise of resurrection to all people.

We are unlikely to be imprisoned for speaking out about the truth, or face persecution and death because of our faith – so what does it mean for us to take up our cross?

Jesus calls us to follow him in living a life which puts our selfishness to death, so that we can live a life for others.

Giles Fraser, an Anglican priest and broadcaster who is often on the radio and writes for the Guardian, has said that he meets people who say they are down, fed up and have no interest in life. He tells them to help someone: volunteer at a homeless shelter; raise money for a children’s charity, take a tea trolley round a hospice… In helping, you find purpose, you put others first, you shift the focus off yourself for a while.

In those examples from Giles Fraser, or in our own everyday life, when we place the will of God first (and remember that Jesus told us to love our neighbour) we find that even while we are suffering, we are capable of doing good. We also learn that it is not God’s will to pile suffering onto us, but to transform us so that suffering becomes more bearable.

The other wonderful thing we find is that Jesus does not call us to carry our cross alone: it is a community calling, to help and support one another, so that we are never alone in carrying the cross we are called to bear.

Even Jesus did not carry his cross alone – he was helped to carry his cross by Simon of Cyrene, who was forced by the Roman soldiers to help Jesus as he carried the cross through the streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha. 

As a Christian fellowship we are called to help one another to carry the cross, through such things as prayer, caring and practical help.

Jesus tells us to ‘deny ourselves’ – to turn our back on selfishness

to ‘take up our cross’ -  accepting God’s way not our own way

& Jesus says ‘follow me’ – together bearing our burdens.

Then as we travel together through Lent, hearing and bearing stories of suffering, we will find at the end of our journey the transformation of Easter resurrection.

In the name of the risen Jesus,

Amen.