When Jesus said, "Take up your cross and follow me," he was uttering some of the most difficult words a consumer-minded, self-absorbed culture could bear to hear.
He wasn't saying:
- Be a daredevil, take unnecessary risks
- Be a martyr, deny yourself the pleasures in life
- Be a self-mutilating devotee, inflict pain upon yourself
Instead, it was all about grasping the deep truth of a quirky statement he made:
If you save your live, you'll lose
it
Those lose your life--for His sake--you'll find it.
How strange. How counter-intuitive.
After further examination, however, it makes a whole lot of sense because it's actually saying:
- Those seeking to preserve self-centered status quo lives end up forfeiting themselves & never discovering what it means to be fully alive. If life is a possession to be savored and merely shared among a select few, then the wondrous joys of self-sacrificing will allude you.
- Those seeking to preserve their comfortable, secure Pleasant Valley Sunday lives by forever looking for short-cuts, smoother roads, risk-, pain- and dirt-free experiences will never experience abundant living.
- Those seeking to preserve American Dream lives by remaining safely where they are and how they are will pay the painful price of being unaffected and uninvolved.
You see, losing one's life as a cross-bearer is not an invitation to follow Jesus into death, but an invitation to follow him into life--a life that is truly human. Truly Christian.
Sources: Dylan's Lectionary Blog, Seeds of Heaven by Barbara Brown Taylor & the New Interpreter's Bible Commentary (volume 8).