Picking Up Your Cross

 

Mark 8:31-38     Lent 2

 

“Deny yourselves!  Take up your cross!”  we hear Jesus say.  Oh, my.  Maybe someone copied that down wrong?  The problem with that hope is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all share this story.  “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus tells us, “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, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  Pick up my cross?  Life is hard enough!  I’d much rather hear, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  But this is what our Revised Common Lectionary, the set of readings that guides our worship, gives us for today.

This morning’s reading from Mark is a curious one, and you have to feel for the disciples. Our Gospel begins with Jesus predicting his own suffering and death.  Of course, the disciples were afraid, and fear almost always clouds our thinking. Peter had just confessed Jesus as Messiah, and now Jesus explains just what that entails. Jesus taught his disciples that he would suffer greatly, and that he would be rejected by those whom the religious community held in high esteem.  He told them that he would be killed.  By now, the disciples’ minds must have been reeling.  When Jesus said that he would rise after three days, what was that supposed to mean? All this news was shocking.  It was so devastating that Peter said “No! This can’t happen to you! There must be another way!”  Peter’s reaction resulted in Jesus calling him “Satan.” Then, calling the crowd to come and listen to him, too, Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”’

Let me make this perfectly clear.  Jesus is not condoning abuse.  This text has been used to justify inflicting injury on partners or family members, and to keep them subservient and submissive.  God has created us to flourish, and Jesus came in human flesh to confirm that.  Jesus said, I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). God desires all our relationships to be ones in which we lift each other up, not tear each other apart.

What do you think of when you hear, “Deny yourselves”?  Do you think about giving up chocolate for Lent?   Maybe denying yourself means that life should be hard, and we should not have any pleasure.  Or maybe denying yourself means to deny those parts of ourselves that we don’t like.  Deny your fears.  Pretend you can handle anything that comes your way without help. Or maybe, as our culture teaches us, denying yourself means that you must be someone else, someone you are not.  You should be thinner than you are, and appear younger than your years total.  Maybe denying yourself causes you to think about all those things that you should do to be different than you are.  “I should do more than I do.  I should not make mistakes.  I should write better sermons.”  What are your “I shoulds”?    Put all those “shoulds” that you tell yourself together and you come up with a person who is not you.  Deny yourself.

Jesus did not pretend to be other than who he was.  In fact, if we follow Jesus, we become who God created us to be.  If we follow Jesus, we realize that denying ourselves means that we open ourselves to the needs of others.  We give ourselves away in love.  To deny ourselves means that we are not the center of our universe.  There are times to put others first.  If you have ever been in a healthy relationship, you understand that love expresses itself both in generous giving and in receiving.  Our experience is that the more we give of ourselves, the more we receive.  When our St. Stephen community looks out for each other, we find joy and happiness.

This is how Jesus lived.  He loved people even when they misunderstood who he was, and what he said.  Jesus even loved those who did not follow him.  “Take up your cross” means that our love is a generous love, not one that is destructive or self-serving.  It’s a love that seeks the good of the other, and not glory for oneself.  “Those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus said, “And those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” (Mark 8:35-36).  This life of which Jesus speaks is one of an abundance of love and of forgiveness.

The deep secret of Jesus’ hard words to us, Barbara Brown Taylor writes,

…is that our fear of suffering and death robs us of life because fear of death always turns into fear of life, into a stingy, cautious way of living that is not really living at all.  The deep secret of Jesus hard words is that the way to have abundant life is not to save it but to spend it, to give it away, because life cannot be shut up and saved any more that a bird can be put into a shoebox and stored on a closet shelf….[Jesus’ words are] not an invitation to follow Jesus into death but an invitation to follow him into life, both now and later on.  To be where God is—to follow Jesus—means receiving our lives as gifts instead of guarding them as our own possessions.  It means sharing the life we have been given instead of bottling it for our own consumption.[1]

St. Francis captured the essence of this in his prayer:

Let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

 

In the name of Christ, let it be so.

 

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

 

[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown.  The Seeds of Heaven.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. 79-81.

Author: Pastor Cheryl Griffin

Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin thinks God has a sense of humor for leading her into ministry, but can’t imagine doing anything else! Pastor Griffin received her BA degree from the College of William and Mary. She worked as an accountant before God led her to the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, where she received her Master of Divinity degree. In the Virginia Synod, Pastor Griffin is a member of the Ministerium Team and frequently leads small groups at synod youth events. She is also a representative to the VA Synod Council.

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