The Way of the Cross

In all the moving and rearranging of books and furniture, and the anxiety over bats, I’ve mostly had my ears plugged with podcasts and the occasional book, so as not to be able to hear when any child asks me anything. I’m listening to Barchester Towers as a treat, and then persecuting myself with the podcast archives of a well known self-identified evangelical who interviews guests in an upbeat cheerful, up-talking sort of way, and who I won’t name now because that’s not the point, but will definitely name at some later moment.

The point is that this well known, one might even say ‘evangelical thought leader’ rarely, if ever, mentions Jesus or God, except only to take digs at long established (like 2000 or more years) doctrine and practice, and to complain about the failures of the church, and mainly invites guests to bolster and support this point of view. One such guest was encouraged to articulate all the griefs accumulated at the mercy of the church, and to tell the story of healing that occurred only when the church had effectively been left behind, and Jesus had been found in the wide open untethered spaces of self-actualization. Gosh it’s hard to write without pronouns. But I’d rather tantalize you than give away who I’m talking about.

The interview built upon itself, the one encouraging the other, commiserating, agreeing, reminding each other how important the conversation was, until finally the person being interviewed said something like, ‘Well, Jesus said take up your cross, not a boulder or some kind of burden that will utterly crush you.’ I hit pause and wandered around the house looking for a pen for several minutes, but couldn’t find one, so it will have to be some other day that I copy down the exact words. But don’t worry, it’s Sunday, and an approximation is good enough for me to launch into what I always say.

Which is that you, and anybody who is thinking about ‘taking up his cross,’ must certainly know that the cross is an instrument of death that is meant to crush you, utterly, to the fullest extent of crushing and death. When Jesus said those words, everybody who heard the sound of his voice had seen the brutality, the humiliation, the crushing horror of people hanging on crosses and dying on them. The disciples and other onlookers didn’t understand these words as the life changing butterfly metaphor that filigreed cross carrying has become. It’s the way of life, we insist, Jesus wants to give life.

Yes, I mean, that is absolutely the point. Jesus’ death on the cross gives life to the world, and even more, to the individual people who collapse helplessly in front of him, crushed to earth by the burden of death they are carrying around in their own bodies, minds, and souls. But look at the cost. The cost is an actual death that Jesus dies, and the death that he invites you to endure now, before you die, that keeps you from ultimately dying. You die, and this is the tricky and impossible bit, to yourself. You so let go of yourself and your own desires and plans and sense of yourself that it is as though you die. The metaphor is death. You walk in the way of the cross, which is the way of crushing and humiliating defeat.

I know we shouldn’t say that, because it’s not a message that will really preach. The steady diet of this podcast that I’ve been imbibing wants to make sure that every single person who listens will be empowered, will be able to reach down inside of the self to find the strength that is really there, will come out stronger and better and more able to help the world. Everything you need is inside of you, you just need the encouragement and permission of yourself and others to find it. When you do, you’ll be strong. So strong. Not weak.

Not crushed under the weight of a death dealing humiliating cross. I think Peter and the others must have visibly shuddered when Jesus told them what he was to endure. And we think they are foolish for not believing him, for even rebuking him and insisting that he wasn’t going to die, wasn’t going to be shamed, wasn’t going to go down in defeat to the grave. But we are no more wise. Who believes him now? The cost of following Jesus is the self, the total self. The cost is acknowledging such a profound, total weakness that you, the quoth believer, admit that you have no hope of life at all in yourself. None. There isn’t anything to reach down to. Unless someone, Jesus, help you, you have nothing and cannot live.

That is a humiliating admission, a crushing one, a death dealing one. So no, most of us don’t really believe in that kind of death Jesus said he would have to die. And when he invites us to join him, we absolutely don’t believe him. We go and find some other message, some other way, some other gospel.

But to the one who doesn’t go away, who picks up the heavy burden of the cross, who shoulders it and falls to earth, for that person there is the gift of eternal life.

Oh, well, if it’s eternal, that must mean it begins later on. So never mind.

No, it begins this moment. If you are willing to die, not in some esoteric martyred generalized metaphorical sense, but to yourself, to your own sense of who you are and what you think you need, you will discover that the way of death, the way of the cross, is the way of life. Life that begins instantly.

Indeed, the one who is life comes alive in you. His destruction of death, and sin, his alien strength, his unmanageable mercy, his real love brings you back to life.

I can’t help saying it, go to church.