THE CROSS IS SOMETHING ELSE
It’s hard to not feel confusion and discomfort on hearing once again Jesus’ words: «If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me». We understand Peter’s reaction very well, when he hears Jesus talk about rejection and suffering, and «taking Jesus aside, he began to rebuke him». The theologian martyr Dietrich Bonhoffer says that Peter’s reaction «proves that, from the beginning, the Church has been scandalized by the suffering Christ. She doesn’t want her Lord to impose the law of suffering on her».
This scandal can become unbearable today for those of us who live in what Leszek Kolakowsky calls «the culture of painkillers», that society obsessed with eliminating suffering and discomfort by means of every kind of drug, narcotic and escape.
If we want to clarify what the Christian attitude should be, we need to understand well in what the cross consists for a Christian, since it can happen that we put it where Jesus never did.
We easily call «cross» everything that makes us suffer, even that suffering that appears in our life generated by our own sin or our mistaken way of living. But we shouldn’t confuse the cross with just any misfortune, setback or discomfort that comes about in life.
The cross is something else. Jesus calls his disciples to follow him faithfully and put themselves at the service of a more human world: God’s reign. This is what’s first. The cross is nothing else than the suffering that comes to us as a consequence of that following, the sad destiny that we must share with Christ if we truly follow his footsteps. That’s why we mustn’t confuse «carry the cross» with masochistic postures, false mortification or what P. Evdokimov calls individualistic and «cheap asceticism».
On the other hand, we need to correctly understand the «renounce oneself» that Jesus asks for in order to carry the cross and follow him. «Renounce oneself» doesn’t mean mortifying oneself just any way, punishing oneself, and even worse, annihilating or destroying oneself. «Renounce oneself» means not hanging onto oneself and forgetting one’s own «ego» in order to build our existence on Jesus. To free ourselves of ourselves in order to radically adhere to him. To say it in another way, «carry the cross» means to follow Jesus, ready to assume the insecurity, the conflict, the rejection or the persecution that the Crucified himself must suffer.
But we believers don’t live out the cross as people defeated, but as bearers of a final hope. Whoever loses their life for Jesus Christ will find it. The God who raised Jesus will raise us also to a full life.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
