Bearing Our Cross

My brothers and sisters, today we are confronted by a decisive passage. Some would say that it is the decisive passage, the crux of St. Mark’s Gospel, the defining moment, the event which fully reveals our Lord’s intent.

It happened at Caesarea Philippi.

Here, Jesus takes the initiative, and for the first time speaks plainly about who he is and the great cost of following him: He is the Suffering Son of Man, and those who follow him must do so by way of the cross, for the cross is the only way to glory.

It was St. Peter who correctly identified him; “You are the Messiah,” he says, but then our Lord explains what it means to be the Messiah, and what it will mean not only for Peter and the Twelve to follow him but for all those who follow him--including me, including you.

This morning, St. Mark tells us that Jesus and his disciples are “on the way.” On the way where? They are in the villages of Caesarea Philippi, but where is their final destination?

We know, you and I know where he is leading us, because we know the end of St. Mark’s story.

Here is a road, a way which will end at the place of the skull, a place called Golgotha; Jesus is walking the way to his cross. “No, Lord. No!”

None of us wants to hear this news, and so on behalf of us all, Peter rebuked him. This is part of today’s message, but the complementary part of the message may be even more difficult for us to hear.

As Jesus’ disciples, we are also on the way to our cross, for the cross is the only way we can follow. “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

I know a young man who began a great career with a major corporation. He had majored in business and had a knack for it. So no one was surprised when he was selected, right out of college, for the corporation’s executive training program. That’s where they train the bright young people of today to be the executive stars of tomorrow.

After only a few months, his boss took him with him to a convention related to his business in Las Vegas. There he was to get a first-hand look at life “at the top.” It became clear that part of what was expected as a top executive in this particular corporation was the willingness and the ability to drink heavily. While troubled by this expectation, he managed to keep up with the best of them; after all, he was no prude, he kept telling himself.

But then the women arrived, the entertainment for the night. This he simply could not do. Thinking of his wife at home and everything he had ever been taught by his parents, he did his best to fade away, returning to his room alone for the remainder of the night.

Later, when they returned back home, his boss called him in to discuss the matter. His boss told him that he was willing to overlook his strange behavior at the convention, as long as it didn’t happen again. He was tempted to say nothing, perhaps even to agree and then do what he felt was right the next time it happened; but his boss gave him little choice.

So he told him straight out that he simply couldn’t do it, that he’d never engage in that kind of behavior. “Why?” his boss wanted to know. “Because it’s against everything I believe. I just can’t do that.

I need to tell you that this young man isn’t some sort of exemplary church member. He attends church fairly regularly, but to my knowledge, he isn’t a great student of the Bible, and certainly he isn’t some “holier than thou” type of person. In fact, he felt humiliated, embarrassed by what he was compelled to tell his boss; but in refusing to go along, in standing up and saying “No,” he began a journey down a narrow way that few wish to walk. He decided on a course of action which thrust him into the forefront of Christian witness, whether he wanted to or not, for by taking this stand he eventually lost his job.

This, I believe, is what our Lord means when he invites us to take up our cross and follow him.

Jesus knew, as he walked along the way that day from Caesarea Philippi to Golgotha, that there was no way for him to be faithful to the purposes of God and avoid his cross. He knew that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected... and be killed...” but he was willing to walk that way.

He also knew that there is no way for us to be faithful to the purposes of God without taking up our cross. Jesus isn’t talking about some subjective experience. Notice that the cross is something we decide to bear, something we take up, not some physical infirmity, our aches and pains.

St. Paul, for example, speaks several times of “his thorn in the flesh,” some unspecified physical ailment which plagued him; but that was not his cross. Paul’s cross was the humiliation and pain he suffered because of his faithfulness to Jesus.

The cross is that which we take up as part of being faithful to Jesus.

For nearly forty years, I have worn a silver cross around my neck that has great meaning for me. It was given to me by the youth of my home congregation upon leaving for seminary; but alas, for too many of us, that’s all a cross is, an ornament on a chain, and not something heavy laid upon our backs.

The first century knew the cross as the electric chair, the gallows, the most cruel form of punishment the world has ever devised, a horrible torture reserved for the worst of criminals.

If we no longer sense the horror and revulsion of the cross, perhaps we cannot also sense its glory. In the Gospel today, Jesus not only tells us that he is walking toward his cross, but he invites us to go along with him, promising us that where the crucified are, there he is also, for those who lose their life for his sake and the sake of the gospel, will save it.

We are walking toward the cross; but we are not walking the path of the cross alone.
The call is to take up our cross and follow along with Jesus, with Jesus. He has walked down that road toward the cross, and he walks down that road with us again and again, wherever the faithful bear their cross.

He walks with the spouse who refuses to join her husband in some deception.

He walks with the individual who has befriended another only to lose other friends who consider this one unacceptable.

He walks with young people who struggle in the face of their peers to come to worship the God who created them when so many others are hitching up their boats for a Sunday morning of sailing.

Having borne his cross before us, he is able to bear our cross with us. This is the crux of the good news according to St. Mark.

Good news? It sounds like bad news in a world in which pain and suffering are avoided and denied at all costs, in which any suffering is considered unfair and unnecessary, in which we are taught to “go along with the flow.” And yet, this talk about bearing our cross is, indeed, good news, for it is by following this way, this narrow, sometimes dark, threatening way that we find our true life.

Follow Jesus, and you will have to walk down this way for there is no other way; and yet the good news is if we are near the cross, we are near Jesus and he is with us.

It’s funny but one of the profound paradoxes of Christianity is to be found in the fact that the one who was unable to carry his own cross is the one who enables us to carry ours. Jesus had to be helped by Simon of Cyrene to carry his cross. He now helps us to carry ours.

The cross is not optional in the Christian life. It simply comes with following Jesus; but we do not have to bear it alone.

AMEN.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.