Scripture: Mark 8:31-38 (NRSV)
One year at summer camp, the theme was “take up your cross and follow me.” Cabins full of boys took turns carrying around a heavy, 10-foot cross wherever they went. Lugging it around was a challenge and it was fun.
As an adult looking back, the concept itself and the fun we had doing it makes me cringe. But what does Jesus really mean when he said “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me?” Should we strap giant crucifixes to our backs?
A friend recently sent me a prayer written by a student at St. Peter’s Seminary in Ankawa, northern Iraq, where Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) provides English teachers. The student is among the Christians who fled from Karamlesh, in Iraq’s Nineveh Plain, as the Islamic State group advanced.
“As you carried your cross, O Lord, we carried it too.
We lost everything except the cross hanging around our necks and in our cars.
We looked at this cross when we were forced to leave our houses.
It is the cross of the pain and the hope,
the cross of the sadness and the hope,
the cross of the resistance and the steadiness
of those who endure injustice but respond to it in love,
even when we feel that the injustice is increasing.
We carried this cross from our lands in Nineveh to other lands
and we still hang on to it.
In spite of all this, you can see the smiles on our faces;
you feel the goodness of our neighbors.
We are full of hope and trust in you O Lord.”
Here is a person whose life has been turned upside-down, yet still finds something to hold on to. But when our lives are comfortable, what cross do we bear? Maybe taking up our cross means a daily choice to remember those whose lives are upended by conflict, to love those who are hard to love, to serve others over ourselves, and to seek justice in an unjust world.
Scripture: Mark 8:31-38 (NRSV)
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For 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. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”