Take up your Cross: Come and die
Matthew 16:24-26
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?
As we saw with Monday’s reading, the way to life is not easy. In this passage Jesus unpacks what following him means. To follow Jesus means taking up the cross – the cross was the way the Romans executed people, so when Jesus says, “take up the cross” he is saying, “come and die.” The followers of Jesus are people who are willing to sacrifice their goals, dreams, plans, comfort, even their very lives as they make the choice to follow Jesus.
We see this clearly in places where people who follow Jesus become martyrs for the faith, being killed because they follow Jesus. But we also see it when people choose to put their own plans, their own comfort, aside in order to follow the call of Jesus to care for the hurting, putting their own wants aside to serve others in the name of Jesus Christ. We see this same pattern when people choose to stand for what is right, even though the pressure from colleagues, friends, even family says, “Just go along with what everyone else is doing, don’t make waves.”
Jesus says, taking up the cross, being willing to come and die, is in fact the path that leads to life. In the upside-down way Jesus works, that God’s kingdom works, playing safe, trying to keep one’s life safe, is the way to lose one’s life – and to lose one’s life as we follow Jesus, is the way that leads to finding life, real life. Lives that are spent living the Jesus way, are lives that in the end are the lives that have significance, that are really alive.
PRAYER:
Lord God, we confess that your Son’s call that we should take up our cross, frightens us. We want to be safe. But as Jesus taught us, the only way to be safe is to risk everything on him. Give us the trust to follow him, dying to self so that we might live his life in us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.