Take Up Your Cross
“Take Up Your Cross”
Matthew 16:24-26
This year, I’ve spent less time than any other Lent on who Jesus healed and what words he preached. All those things matter. We can come back and talk about them during the rest of the year. We’ve got time to think about things. The question that I’ve felt compelled to ask is this: “What are we supposed to do? What would it really mean for us to follow Jesus of Nazareth in our own lives?”
I’ve made some suggestions over the last few weeks. For example, Jesus left his home. Sometimes we have to be willing to leave what we know and love behind, too. It’s hard to let go of what’s familiar!
Jesus showed up at the River Jordan to be baptized by John. Here, we learn two more early lessons: to humble ourselves (he’s the last to be baptized) and to make God’s love the starting point for what we do. In following Jesus, we are not out to “win” something. God already loves us. Our goal is to take that love to heart and live gratefully.
Next, Jesus goes to the wilderness. We, too, have to do the hard work of becoming self aware, of learning what our baggage is. What has the potential to get between you and rising to God’s calling? In the wilderness, Jesus faced his temptations, the things that could have led him to settle for being less than he might have been. All of us need to have a little “wilderness time,” too.
If we’re paying attention, Jesus shows us that ministry reuires relationships. He invites strangers to be his disciples. He creates community—a group of people who will travel through life together. Those disciples will make plenty of mistakes. They will struggle to follow him. However, “together” is how they will do things. If we want to follow Jesus, “together” is still the best way.
The other thing about those disciples is that they have to live with not knowing what’s next. First, Jesus calls them. They drop everything and follow him. That’s amazing! If that call came for us, would we even hear it? Would we be willing to drop everything? Every more challengingly, they have no idea what’s next and won’t for the next three years. After a while, maybe they gained some confidence: “Well, we seem to eat and sleep somewhere and we’ll probably help someone.” Imagine the trust that took…
Finally, if we are going to follow Jesus then, sooner or later, we actually have to do something. If we are going to follow Jesus and we see someone who is hungry, our calling isn’t to let Jesus know. We have to feed them. If we are going to follow Jesus and someone is lonely, we have to visit them. If are going to follow Jesus and someone is sick, we have to do everything we can to help them return to health. Our “5 loaves and too fish” excuse isn’t going to work. We have to be the people who try. If we actually do something we might actually witness something amazing.
This is the “come to Jesus” moment that happens on every work trip. It is a thrill to lean into the world and go in search of those in need: “I’m so ready to make a concrete difference in someone’s life!” We plan over the phone with folks in the area. We drive down to meet people and walk through homes and listen as folks talk about their needs. We recall similar jobs we’ve done on previous trips. We put together lumber lists. Finally, we take the seemingly endless drive to wherever we’re going that year.
Then, you have a sleepless night in a bed that isn’t nearly as comfortable as you’re bed at home. You wake up super early. You walk outside and begin sorting tools for the work sites. People are anxious and a little “picky” about which saw they want on their work site. You pause for a moment and realize that your shirt is already soaking wet. Even though it’s only 5:45 a.m., it’s already that humid and it’s going to get so much worse. You gather your group and it dawns on you that you really should have written down better directions: “God help me here. I turn at the bent mailbox, right?” The moment you arrive, it dawns on you: “Oh my God, now we actually have to do the work…”
The classic example of this was on a work trip in which one of the locals asked if we could build them a pole barn. One of our leaders was of a work trip mindset: “That would be amazing and aren’t we amazing, too.” He told them that we would love to build a pole barn, that we should all go take a look at the site and come up with a plan together, that this would be no problem at all. Then, after waiting for the local to be out of earshot, he turned to me and asked, “What’s a pole barn?” I literally fell over laughing…
If you’re going to follow Jesus, you have to ground yourself spiritually in God’s unconditional love, you have to face your own brokenness, you have to rise to your calling and leave some things behind. Sooner or later, though, you have to actually do the work. You have to roll up your sleeves and start sweating. You have to immerse yourself in the business of helping someone by doing something that’s going to be really hard to do.
Some people will try to “sell” the whole “following Jesus” thing by telling you that if you do something, then God will love you. I’ve already told you, though, that God loves you, no matter what. As Paul would write, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God,” not even our own inaction. Other people will try to sell you on living your faith by telling you that if you are following Jesus then nothing bad will happen to you. Now, I don’t necessarily expect you to know how things worked out for all the disciples but I will tell you this, almost all of them ended up being killed for what they believed. I do kind of expect people to at least know what happened to Jesus, though. He’s arrested and humiliated by the powers that be, rejected by the crowd and dies on a cross. “Do what Jesus did and everything is going to be great” seems like a stretch, right? “He did it so we don’t have to” seems problematic too when we pause and realize how high the cost of discipleship can be.
Here’s what Jesus told the disciples several times before any of the bad stuff really started to happen. “If you want to follow me, the first thing that you have to do is learn how to live selflessly. “What’s in it for me” can’t be the question that guides you. You have to deny yourself. That is one of the hardest things you can ask a human being to do. We’re supposed to humble ourselves. I ran into a quote I really liked this week: “Humility is not about thinking less of yourself. Humility is thinking about yourself less.” (It’s from C.S. Lewis) It’s really hard to think about ourselves less when we’ve spent our whole lives thinking about ourselves. “Enough of me talking about me. Tell me, what do you think about me?”
Jesus challenges us to think less about ourselves. I think back to Tracy and my earliest days together. It was so hard to make the turn from thinking about me to thinking about us. It was a fight to move from, “Here’s what I want to do” to “Hey, what should we do this weekend?” I once spent a rather long car drive telling Tracy about all the places I wanted to go for more graduate school until she finally asked, “Oh…and what about me?”
We get married. We have children. Our children turn out to have their own needs—like wanting to be awake at 3:00 in the morning and wanting you to be awake with them. For the next 18 years those kids keep having needs and then, just when we thought they would have less needs, it turns out that they now have different needs. The thing is, the whole story is not a story of being impoverished by focussing on your child’s needs but of being liberated from your own self-centeredness. It turns out that there is profound meaning in having a life that focusses on something and someone besides me, myself, and I.
Over the course of our lives, we slowly learn how to let go of our own wants and needs. It’s not that we learn how to become selfless saints. Rather, we learn how to defer, how to be patient, how to “hold our breath” a little longer each time. If we do this enough times, eventually, we learn that we can offer the same relatively selfless compassion and care to people other people, even strangers. Over time, we discover that there is a world full of people who desperately need to know that someone actually cares.
That’s when we need to remind ourselves of Jesus’ second instruction: “Take up your cross.” Its one thing to be less self-centered. It’s quite another thing to be self-sacrificing. The cross was reserved for people who were being humiliated. The cross was an object of great suffering. The cross was how the “powers that be” made an example of someone who threatened them. Jesus is saying, “If you want to follow me, prepare to suffer because there are things in this life that are worth suffering for.”
If your goal is to suffer less, if your goal is to live pain free, don’t care about, much less, love human beings. In this world, people get sick and suffer and die. In this world, life can be incredibly unfair. Rather than suffering with others or even suffering for others, why not just skip the whole thing? Well, your life will be empty and I hear that an empty life has it’s own kind of pain. And, yes, the central thing that Jesus called us to do was to love, to love God and love the people around us. We’re free to choose not to love but we can’t choose not to love and actually follow Jesus.
If we deny ourselves and love others, then we will inevitably suffer with those people. Sometimes, we may even suffer for them. Of course, loving like that is also how we come to know joy and fulfillment and deep meaning. Still, if we choose to walk in faith, sooner or later we are going to look up and see a tsunami of pain that is coming straight for us.
What do followers of Jesus actually do? We lean into the needs of the people around us. When things get hard, we lean in even harder. We trust that when the weight of our cross grows heavy, the God who loves us—no matter what—will be with us as we discvover what it means to love—no matter what.