Take Up Your Cross

Reflection

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Jesus is utterly honest about what discipleship costs. He does not advertise an easy, comfortable life. He calls us to a cross. To his first hearers, who had watched condemned criminals carry their own crosses to execution, the image was stark: following Jesus means the death of the self-ruled life. This is the heart of what it means to be cross shaped. The cross is not only something done for us; it is a pattern pressed into the shape of our lives. To take up our cross is to lay down our insistence on being in charge — our self-interest, our demand to have life on our own terms — and to follow Jesus wherever he leads. Then comes the great paradox: "whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it." The world tells us to grasp, to protect ourselves, to put ourselves first, promising that this is the way to a full life. Jesus says the opposite. Clutch your life and it slips through your fingers. Let it go for his sake and you find, to your surprise, that you have gained it. This is not a grim call to misery. It is an invitation to the only kind of life that truly lives — a life no longer enslaved to the exhausting project of self, but freely spent in following the One who first gave himself for us.