Take up thy cross, the Saviour said, if thou wouldst my disciple be; deny thyself, the world forsake and humbly follow after me’
Well that’s all very well, but which cross are we to take up? Protestant? Catholic? Orthodox? The empty cross, the crucifix, or the crossed cross that signals victory over death? Or is there some mild little Anglican cross somewhere which we can take refuge in? Perhaps not, for one of the principles of our own tradition is that we have no distinctive faith of our own, only what the Church has always believed.
But let’s make this more personal. What does Jesus mean when he invites those who want to follow him to take up their cross? Perhaps we should think first of what he does not mean. He does not say take up my cross and follow me’. We are not going to Calvary in the sense that he did, in the sense that we follow today. We are not going to save the world. It is his cross that we venerate, not our own. But nor does Jesus say, Take up the cross’ as though there were only one cross, one way of responding to this call, one pattern which is meant to fit all. Jesus says let them deny themselves and take up their cross.’ This is puzzling. What is your cross? My cross?
Let’s start with the first image of the cross, the empty cross. This is a cross to which we might feel drawn, a cross we take on in our strength, and that comes from pure thankfulness and a good measure of Christian altruism. It could be a willingness to take big risks for the Gospel of God, to be prepared to make sacrifices, of time and money, a kind of self giving which honours God and Christ and in some way also inspires us. The pretty and excitable Spanish girl who grew up to be St Teresa of Avila dreamed of running away to North Africa to preach the Gospel among the Muslims, in the hope that she might be rather glamorously martyred. This exuberant attitude is in the spirit of those Christian soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before. We should not laugh at such heroic dreams, they are the seed bed of Christian vocation and as one who works among youngish people who are called to ministry in the Church I want to honour the generosity of those hopes. In fact I sometimes think one of the reasons Christianity appears to be dying out among the teens and twenties is that we may have made it too comfortable, too easy, without demands and risks and challenges. But though that may be true, the heroic self-sacrifice that Teresa dreamed of was not the cross she actually did take up, though it doubtless prepared her imagination and her will for what God asked of her. Teresa became a Carmelite nun, an energetic extrovert who was also a mystic and contemplative. She was also immensely practical and spent years struggling to reform the Carmelite order, dealing routinely with the complacent, the hostile and complaining who carped and grumbled at the changes she brought about. I see her in my mind’s eye later in life, ill and cold, bouncing around in a horse drawn carriage on rough and stony roads in the pouring rain as she went from convent to convent, working to renew them in the spirit of love and sacrifice. The cross for her at that stage of her life was surely the everyday pain and tedium and frustration involved in doing what she had to do. And so it is with us.
And it is here that perhaps the image of the Catholic cross is most helpful. When we are tired and ill, and uncertain, when our prayers seem long and difficult, when we work with or live with people who are simply infuriating then we see Jesus, carrying the cross to Calvary, or just hanging in mid space between earth and heaven, and perhaps it occurs to us then that we don’t have to go looking for an appropriate cross, or choose something from a from a range of options off a shelf. The point is that the cross is already in our lives. What weighs you down, what crushes you and hurts you, what frustrates you that you can do nothing about. There are many small frustrations and irritations in life that we can and should do something about, but I am talking about the things we can’t help. The parent, the child, the spouse, the aspects of our own character which make us weep with shame or regret or envy of others who appear to have it easy. That wrong decision which set the course of our lives, that injustice which can never be put right. We can respond to these things by denying them of course, or by blaming them on to those around us. But Jesus asks us to face up to them, to carry them for ourselves and for him. He asks us to respond with obedience because it is actually refusing the cross which leaves us empty and dead inside and Jesus does not want death for us, but life. By your obedience, by taking up the cross which is your cross, he is forming you into his own likeness, he is preparing you for eternal life. It is the grit in the oyster which finally produces the pearl, and Christ sees us not only as we are, but as we shall be, as whole and glorious and fully alive as God longs for us to be.
Christ’s journey leads to Calvary and so does ours, not to his Calvary but to our own. I remember once hearing the theologian Ken Leech saying that for most of us ordinary Christians he was contrasting us with saints and martyrs conformity to Christ is finally achieved by our dying.
And this is the universal human vocation the one bit of the human pilgrimage that none of us desire and none of us can avoid. And it is at this point perhaps that the Orthodox cross brings us both challenge and comfort. It reminds us of where the Christian journey through this life ends, and invites us to think about our own death. But to think about our own death, not just as a going to sleep, not just as a snuffing out of all that we have been and are, but as a final surrender into the life of Christ. A final joyful surrender into the life of Christ. I am so excited ‘ To make this surrender in a world which is terrified of death is an act of real courage. To die in a crazy confidence that life will prevail not death; not knowing what the content of that life is we cannot say because we are not yet immortal and we have absolutely no experience of what kind of life that would be. We can only think, helpfully or unhelpfully of caterpillars turning into butterflies and phoenixes rising from the dead. SO there is a blank and a nothing in our imaginations, a blank and a nothing which faith must knock against, must defy in the faith of Christ. And not only faith but hope. Hope that the Church has always had that Christ will raise us up on the last day. And not only hope but Love. It is love which prepares us for life, for immortality, for a sharing in that risen life which is the destiny and glory of all creation.
So Christ asks us today, take up your cross and follow me’. Will you follow as he asks you, shouldering the burden as faithfully and hopefully and lovingly as you can? Because if you do so you will find that walking in the way of the cross is the way of life and peace. That other great Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross once wrote, We too must have our cross, as our Beloved had his cross, until he died the death of love’. Let us practice this Lent so that we too may die the death of love and be reborn to eternal life.