September 3, 2023, Cross-bearing 101, Matthew 16:21-28 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ September 3, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

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If someone asked you, “What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?” or “What does it mean to be a good Christian?” what would you tell them?

We might tell them something like what we read in Romans today, where Paul gives a pretty comprehensive list of Christian virtues: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Obviously, we might not measure up to all that perfectly, but it’s certainly a good and challenging description of what Christians try to do and to be.

I think we’d all agree: being followers of Jesus, means we ought to be good people who do good things, because Jesus, our Lord, is good. The only one who might not agree with us is Jesus. Because that’s not what he told his disciples. If he had told them to be good, to be kind, to be loving, to be selfless, to be generous – they wouldn’t have had any problems with that. Peter wouldn’t have been offended by Jesus talking about being good. But what Jesus was teaching his disciples was, “I am about to be arrested, tortured, humiliated, and killed.”

Can we blame Peter for being offended? For being horrified? His reaction wasn’t “Yes, Lord, anything you say.” It was, “God forbid, Lord! This must never happen to you!” And then Jesus made matters worse. “Let me be clear,” he said. “If anyone wants to be my follower, they have to deny themselves, too; they have to take up their cross, and follow me.” Suffering. Shame. Death. That’s the road I’m headed down. And those are the marks of my followers.

In Philippians, Paul calls us to ^“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jesus emptied himself of the power and glory of being God so that he could live among the people he loved. Denying himself meant that he gave up what belonged to him by right. So being a disciple means first of all that we give up all those things that we hold onto, that we feel we have a right to.

And that absolutely goes against the grain for us as much as it did for Peter. Maybe even more so, because as Americans we are all about rights. Our Constitution spells it out: every person has inalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. But Jesus says that following him means letting go, willingly, of our autonomy, our freedom, even our happiness. We know that Jesus promised us that if we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness all that we need will be given to us. But FIRST we have to loosen our hold. We don’t deny ourselves because we’re trash, just sinful people who are worth nothing and don’t deserve good things – if we said that we would be speaking evil of the creator who made us and who loves us enough to die for us. And we definitely don’t deny ourselves because punishing ourselves will somehow make us more spiritual – that is just pride and foolishness. We deny our selves, we lay down our rights, simply and exactly because we are following in the steps of the Christ.

I think it is very important to stress that letting go of our own rights doesn’t mean that we take the rights of the people around us lightly. Jesus gave up everything, even to the point of death, not because life and freedom were unimportant to him, but because by giving up his life he brought real life to us all. As disciples, our self-denial is a reflection of his. We deny our right to the world’s definition of freedom, to the world’s definition of comfort, to the world’s definition of life, not because we hate ourselves, and not because those are worthless things, but because we love Jesus, and because we know there is something better. By following Jesus we can offer hope to those who live without hope. By following Jesus, we can uphold the rights of those whose rights are trampled by others. It is because real life, the life that Jesus has to offer us, is infinitely worth having, that we can give up our hold on the kind of life this world has to offer. In loosing our hold on our own life, we disciples can be givers of life just as our teacher is.

But Jesus made it even harder. Jesus said, “Whoever would come after me, let him take up his cross.” For the disciples, that would have been incredibly shocking. To them a cross wasn’t a religious symbol. The cross meant death, and it meant the most degrading, agonizingly painful death they could have thought of. They knew what the Law said about it: a person who is put to death by hanging on a tree is cursed. Sometimes we need to be reminded what a hard thing that was for Jesus to say.

It’s a common idiom; people say, “It’s just my cross to bear,” and I think often they just mean that they have something unpleasant that they have to buck up and endure. But to take up our cross isn’t about being stoic, keeping our chin up. Taking up our cross means to take hold of the very worst the world has to throw at us – pain, cancer, broken relationships, depression and fear and death – to carry those burdens, following Jesus, all the way to his cross. All of our crosses have their end in the cross of Christ, where the very worst the world had to offer was destroyed. Because Jesus was obedient all the way to death, the cross became the way of life for us.

And since Jesus is our example, we need to remember that Jesus didn’t carry his cross alone. It was hard for Jesus, just as our lives are so often hard. Jesus stumbled under the weight of the cross. And when the soldiers grabbed someone out of the crowd to carry the cross for Jesus, he didn’t say, “No, no, this is my cross to bear, I’ve got to do it on my own.” Simon of Cyrene carried the cross for him; he bore the weight of Jesus’s cross for a time. And we are his disciples, too, when we allow others to carry our burdens for us: because there are times when we are weary; there are times when our cares are just too heavy for us, when we are stumbling under the weight. But carrying our cross isn’t about being tough; it’s about living with hope and purpose. Carrying our cross is not about being a victim, it’s about living abundantly, in the hope that the powers and treasures of this world are already rotting away, and that the Spirit of the One who defeated death lives within us, and among all of us.

Obviously, we try to do and be those good things that Paul talks about in Romans: loving, generous, kind, devout, hospitable, and on and on. But that’s not what sets us apart as followers of Jesus Christ. When it came to being virtuous in Jesus’s time, the Pharisees pretty much had that covered. In our day, I think most of us know non-Christians who are much more virtuous and admirable human beings than we are.

And by the same token, we Christians don’t have a monopoly on suffering. This world is full of people who are suffering: Christians, Muslims, Atheists, you name it. Suffering is an equally opportunity employer in our world. Suffering is also not what sets us apart as followers of Jesus Christ. The whole world lives under the shadow of death.

But for us, as followers of Jesus Christ, we’ve seen beyond the shadow. We follow the one who went all the way to death and made a way through. Followers of Jesus carry the burdens the world heaps on us all; we hold the privileges and pleasures of this world lightly; we share the pain and suffering of the world willingly; because we walk in the light of the Resurrection. +