Taking Up Our Cross?

Mark 8:27-38
Gospel Reading for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)

“If any wish to come after me, 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. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” - Mark 8:34b-36

This verse is one that is baked into my spiritual journey. If we are to truly follow Jesus then we must take up our crosses. We must be willing to lose our lives. I cannot tell you how many Sunday morning and youth group sermons I have heard about that topic. It was a verse that we remembered and printed on t-shirts. It was our calling.

And I’m not sure if any of us did it.

I am not second guessing the sincerity behind any of the people who have quoted that verse in earnestness (including yours truly), but those stakes do not really present themselves to a white, middle-class American kids. As much as martyrdom was a hot topic for late 90s evangelicals—I owned and regularly perused a copy of Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus myself—it wasn’t really on the table in South Carolina.

I am not complaining, by the way. But it gets at the heart of what denying oneself and taking up their cross means in a less-perilous context. Despite what alarmists will tell you, Christians are not in danger of being rounded up in detention centers for their faith.

Growing up, self-denial and cross-carrying meant not denying you were a Christian (this is a situation I have never encountered), remaining pure from sin (a situation I have encountered many times with very mixed results), and avoiding the music, movies, and pop culture of the non-Christian world (I was so good at this in the music department that I am very fortunate that Wikipedia was around when I got to college and needed to make conversation with classmates). I write in jest, but it was a very serious thing and many of us took it seriously.

But did we ever actually look like Jesus? Again, this is not to knock the people who taught us these things. Many of them were good people who loved us and tried to love God with their whole heart. But I wish if we had taken things so seriously that it was less focused on things that made us look like clean-cut American kids and more that made us look like person-loving, poor-blessing, meal-providing, mercy-giving, whole-healing God-with-us we were supposed to follow.

I think if we were taught that greed, selfishness, lacking compassion, and the like were more dangerous than secular music, R-rated movies, and not wearing a Christian t-shirt at school then maybe the world would look a little bit different; maybe even a little bit better. I am not sure if a lot of the things that seemed so essential to church-going was actually taking up my cross.

I find hope in the fact that grace is so essential to following Jesus. Even when we miss the mark, there is a chance to try again. So we try to follow him again, try to understand what it means to take up our cross in this complicated world.