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Years ago, while I was still preparing for ministry, I was under the care of Shenandoah Presbytery down in Virginia. There was an all-women’s Presbyterian Church (USA) college in our bounds, Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA. The Campus Pastor was Rev. Patricia Cox and I got to hear her preach several times as she did pulpit supply in the area. I remember in particular a sermon of hers that had to do with the cross. Let me try to recount some of it here. Granted this is remembering a sermon from thirty years ago. Most sermons are forgotten even by the minister by Sunday lunch. This sermon was that memorable.
Being the campus pastor of a Presbyterian women’s college Rev. Cox saw many young women wearing a necklace with a cross on it. Pastor that she was, Rev. Cox wanted to help them understand the meaning of this symbol they wore around their neck, that it wasn’t some sort of blessing charm or sanctified adornment, that’s its meaning was much more profound. Rev. Cox boldly stated that we would see a lot less of people wearing crosses around their necks as sentimental, ornamental jewelry if we exchanged the cross for a symbol in our culture that would embody what the cross meant in Jesus’ day. She would then, to great shock and awe, suggest that these beautiful, quaint, little ornamental crosses should be replaced with beautiful, quaint, little ornamental electric chairs. In fact, we should even replace those big, gaudy crosses that ministers to like wear around their necks with big, gaudy electric chairs.
You see, the cross in Jesus’ day was the cruelest form of public execution there was and it was reserved particularly for those guilty of crimes against the Roman Empire or against the Emperor. Back then, everybody would have recognized the cross as the most horrific form of capital punishment there was. You would not have found people wearing necklaces of such a thing. It would have been considered abhorrent.
In case you didn’t know, it took several centuries for the cross to become the predominant symbol of the Christian faith. The earliest Christian symbol seems to have been a fish. The Greek word for fish, Ichthus, made a wonderful acronym for (Iesus)Jesus (Christos)Christ, (Theous) of God (‘Uios)Son, (Soter)Saviour and it also harkened back to Jesus’ miraculous feedings.
Today, here in Canada, wearing a symbol that would seem to popularize capital punishment would certainly turn some heads. The House of Commons abolished the death penalty in 1976 and the topic is frowned upon. Moreover, it seems hanging was the preferred method. Can you imagine people wearing a necklace with a noose ornament on it? That wouldn’t go over so well. A noose would be more symbolic of racial hate crime.
There are other ways to execute a person from which we might derive a replacement symbol for the cross: lethal injection, poisonous gas, or firing squad. But, using a hypodermic needle, or a gas cylinder, or a rifle would still not be understood as a symbol for a form of execution. A hypodermic needle necklace might rather represent sympathy for drug addicts. A gas cylinder would be absolutely meaningless unless you are in to welder’s rights. Wearing a rifle on a necklace around your neck would locate you in the camp of gun owner activists. The electric chair, well, even up here in Canada everybody knows the only purpose of the electric chair was capital punishment.
Rev. Cox preached this sermon hoping to help her students understand how sentimental we Christians have become about the meaning of the cross. She wanted these young women at the beginning of their adult lives to understand that the cross they wore was more than a fashion accessory. It was rather a call to discipleship, a call to follow Jesus. Now, these were the daughters of some very wealthy Southern Presbyterians and it is not likely that they put this cross around their necks understanding the gravity of the call to follow Jesus. A good many of them would have received their cross to commemorate joining the church when they were12 or 13, or Grandmother gave it to them because it was important to Grandmother and they wore to remember her, or they had picked it up along the way to either identify with the Christian faith or to wear as some form of spiritual protection that keeps them safe on airplanes or just to be fashionable. For the most part, they just did not realize that this cross symbolized the way of life of those who follow Jesus.
Anyway, looking deeper at what Jesus meant when he said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross, and follow me.” Well, a little-known fact is that Jesus wasn’t the only person saying “Take up your cross.” This was a somewhat common phrase used by people who knew they were doing and asking people to do things that would upset their Roman occupiers that could warrant crucifixion. One of the things the Romans made the people they were crucifying do was carry their own cross to the place where they would be crucified. This was also a very public event. Crucifixions did not happen behind prison walls. They happened along the roads as people entered a city. They happened on hilltops. The Romans made a point of crucifying people very publicly in order to make a statement about what happens to those who go against them. It was intimidation.
Jesus’ invitation to take up your cross and follow him wasn’t an invitation to enter into an armed revolt against Rome and expect to be crucified. He was making it quite clear that living according to his teachings, according to the way of the Kingdom of God which he proclaimed to have come near, would run against the grain of life in the Roman world. Those who lived the Jesus Way would be seen as betraying the core values of the infrastructure of community life and as threats to community stability. This running against the grain in the very least would invite public humiliation akin to that suffered by those that the Romans put on spectacle by making them carry their own cross to the place they would be crucified in front of everyone. Many early Christians were harassed, run out of town, and banished from their trades, and some were martyred.
We have to ask what was Jesus teaching his followers to do that was so controversial, so against the grain? Jesus taught his followers to love God above all else and to love our neighbour as ourself. He said to love and pray for our enemies rather than taking up arms and seeking vengeance. He taught to live in a way that creates peace, economic fairness, justice. He taught sacrificial generosity and living simply rather than accumulating wealth. He taught to give shelter to those who have no home rather than building bigger houses for ourselves. He taught taking care of the widow and the orphan not by just throwing money at them but actually taking them into your lives. Clothe the naked. Feed the hungry. Give water to the thirsty. Lend money expecting nothing in return. Show hospitality to strangers and to refugees expecting nothing in return. Visit prisoners and show even them compassion. Forgive and don’t bear grudges. Seek what’s best for others even if it comes at a cost to oneself.
Jesus did not come to start an armed rebelling. He came to start small friendship networks of people who in their loyalty to him and love for him would live according to his teachings. These small friendship networks would spread the Reign of God throughout the world like a virus, but not be a death dealing plague like the Roman Empire was. His followers would be a plague of healing, if you would pardon me for using an analogy such as this at a time such as this. Love, love, love, unconditional and sacrificial love lived out by the followers of Jesus in their homes, neighbourhoods, towns, and cities – that’s the invasion of the Kingdom of God into our world. That’s what Jesus came to start. He did it by calling disciples who would learn his way of life and thereby embody him and in turn they would call disciples who would also learn Jesus’ way of life and then they would call disciples and so on and so on. In the power and presence of the Holy Spirit this way of life, the Reign of God, would spread through the world and be for the healing of it until Jesus returns and ultimately heals God’s good Creation of Sin, Death, and Evil.
We look at this and say what a beautiful vision, how is it so threatening. But do we realize how it would turn the world upside-down if the followers of Jesus actually took his teachings seriously. The Jesus Way, the Way of the Cross, goes against everything we ourselves hold dear as good citizens of good nations that are the historical remnant of the Roman Empire. Think about it. The Jesus Way goes against our “pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” approach to dealing with poverty; our “I’ve got a right to get really rich and have everything I want no matter if it’s at the expense of others becoming poorer and even if it kills the planet we live on” approach to the economy; our “my tax dollars should help us before it helps them who come to my country seeking refuge” way of dealing with immigration; our way of “white people get served first” when it comes to health care, education, and legal justice. I don’t think I need to go further with this list of our core values as a culture.
These core values are antithetical to the Jesus Way of life, the Way of the Cross, and yet they are core components of the ideological infrastructure of this great nation which has historically self-identified as Christian. Oddly, we, the followers of Jesus, are the ones who over the centuries in the desire to protect our freedoms and to keep our comforts have turned the cross into the symbol worn on shields as we headed off to war. We have reduced the cross to a nostalgic reminder that Jesus died for my sins so I can go to heaven when I die thinking that “me and my little sin problem” is all the Gospel is about. In a culture where everybody is nominally Christian we came to understand the cross as simply the sufferings of the difficult circumstances we have to deal with in life. We’ve reduced the cross to a piece of jewelry we wear to remind ourselves that “I’m a Christian.” We’ve made it to be everything and anything other than the emblem of the way we will be treated by the world for living the Jesus Way.
Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow him. This is a call to take his teachings seriously and be his disciples before we are anything else; to be his disciples in our homes, in our workplaces, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities. “Take up your cross” is a call to love proactively, unconditionally, and sacrificially realizing that it will for some twisted Satan-in-the-scheme-of-things reason draw negative attention to us.
Winding down, I should give an example of Christians who actually got what it was to take up your cross and follow Jesus. This is the last Sunday in February which is Black History Month. This is the Martin Luther King, Jr. month, the Rosa Parks month, the Ebenezer Church month. This is the month when many faithful followers of Jesus are being celebrated for taking up the cross. The Civil Rights Movement arose among Christians who “Took up the Cross” and followed Jesus into speaking Kingdom of God truth to the powers that be even at the cost of their own lives. There’s still a lot of work left to be done in that area. Will we the followers of Jesus pick it up? There’s more. Do we love God’s good Creation enough to “Take up the cross” with respect to the environment? Do we love those who don’t have not enough to live on enough to “Take up the Cross” on their behalf and vocalize their need for more than just a fair minimum wage? I could go on. Taking up the cross is more than just being a good person who keeps their belief in God through the difficult circumstances of life. It is to live the costly life of actually following Jesus’ teachings, particularly his call to show proactive, unconditional, sacrificial love. Amen.
