15 February 2024 Luke 9:22-25
Jesus did not say we must take up our frustrations every day and follow Him.
Jesus did not say we must take up our problems every day and follow Him.
Jesus did not say we must take up our annoyances every day and follow Him.
He said we must take up a cross. Daily.
For a long time, it was not hard to find crosses to bear. You didn’t have to look for them – they would find you, and they did.
The cross was not just a form of execution. It was designed to cause more than just death, worse than just death. The cross was designed to kill people slowly, not from wounds, but from slow suffocation. The wounds of the cross were not especially bloody, but were designed to create a perfect agony of pain. The death of the cross was a death where you feel the life being slowly squeezed out of you, where you know what you have to do to get the air you need, but every attempt causes shocks of pain everywhere in your body. The cross wore you down little by little, the blood in your veins becoming thicker and thicker through lack of oxygen. Death didn’t come quickly. Sometimes it could take days. And while death was coming, the cross was an instrument of shame. People were crucified in public, naked, for everyone to see. The people who were crucified were not ordinary criminals, but the kind people hated, the kind people wanted to see suffer – arsonists, insurrectionists, traitors.
He said we must take up all that. Pain, cruelty, injustice, hate. Daily.
For a long time, it was not hard to find crosses to bear. You didn’t have to look for them – they would find you, and they did.
Some people still have lives that are full of crosses, but many people don’t. We don’t have agonizing pain daily; in fact, our lives have benefitted from generations of hard work by many people to prevent exactly that kind of suffering. We have laws that prevent cruel injustices and arbitrary punishments. We have rights that are protected. We have medicines and hospitals to prevent the kind of physical torment that was considered normal in ancient times. We have shelter to protect us from the elements, entertainments to help amuse and relax us, schools to make us smarter and more skillful in providing for ourselves, food in astonishing amounts – in many developed countries there simply is no starvation, and obesity is a bigger problem. So what do you do when you are called to take up a cross, and there are no crosses to be found?
First, you give thanks.
Then you ask where all these improvements in life have come from, and you find that they have come from more and more people internalizing the teaching of the crucified Jesus. We have modern science because centuries of Christians and Jews said God created the world good, and so it is worthwhile to look closely at it to see how it works. We have schools and universities because followers of Jesus built them, and taught there that God loves all people, finds them intrinsically valuable, and so people discovered human rights, and ended slavery, and promote justice. And other people built more schools, built whole nations and cultures to make more of all this.
Then you say to yourself, “Since I am the beneficiary of all these things, all the hard work and sacrifices of millions of people I have never known, and all because of the followers of the crucified Jesus, is there any risk too great for me to take for His sake? Is there any love or loyalty to Him that is too much?”
Then you say, no. There are no risks too great, no love or loyalty that is too much. You say, “I am the heir of riches beyond measure,” and you follow, and build more. Crosses can mean bearing pain. They can also mean building blessings.
Thank God if there are sufferings you need no longer bear. Your cross is to build blessings.
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