Biblical phrases and images often lose their teeth when they enter everyday parlance. Take “good Samaritan,” for example. In scripture, it’s the loathsome enemy who, shockingly, saves your life. Today, it’s the kindly stranger who rescues your cat from a tree. Nothing against cat rescue, but it doesn’t pack quite the same punch.
Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them take up their cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24 abridged (NRSV)
Likewise, “Take up your cross.” These days it means accepting life’s vicissitudes, as in “we all have our crosses to bear.” But Jesus wasn’t talking generically about bearing up under personal challenges, making a virtue of suffering. He was talking specifically about being paraded, in Andrew McGowan’s words, “from prison to gallows, carrying the instrument of torture and death.”
It would’ve been a familiar spectacle; the Romans weren’t stingy with crosses. Slaves, insurrectionists, robbers, people of low status and no hope whipped through the streets in processions choreographed for dehumanization. They were warnings, object lessons, the violent moral of the empire’s heartless story. To take up your cross was to join that humiliating parade, as Jesus himself soon would. And later, many of his disciples, too. For his sake, they became all shame.
Now, Jesus was no sadist. He didn’t want the cross for himself, and he never commanded us to run after torture and disgrace. But he did call us to love. And because a life that looks like love affronts everything that passes for wisdom in this world, that parade may yet await us. As someone once observed, “If you don’t love, you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.” We may yet become a warning. Christ’s shame may yet be us.
Prayer ~ Jesus, disabuse me of the notion that I can follow you without incurring rejection and ridicule. If I’m not yet all shame, grant me a closer following.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Luti is a long time seminary educator and pastor, author of Teresa of Avila’s Way and numerous articles, and founding member of The Daughters of Abraham, a national network of interfaith women’s book groups.