Taking up the cross – Mark 8:27-38, Isaiah 50:4-8a
I am doing something different this morning. As I was preparing for two sermons – today’s and one for the service for Enos tomorrow – I decided to re-work an address I heard many years ago – the induction address of John Maitland, President of the Baptist Union in 1988.
This address has stayed with me because it was good, but also because I knew John (or John knew me) from the day I was born, and he was a good man! He was church secretary at Campbelltown Baptist when my father ministered there, and as my mother told me this week, “He was an excellent church secretary and a good friend.” He was also a great host! His daughter was my friend and at her birthday parties he would pretend to play the piano, but it was actually a pianola – playing by itself!
And I am going to use that analogy for my sermon this morning. I look like I’m preaching, but someone else – John – has done the work!
His theme was ‘growing in discipleship’ – witnessing to the transforming power of a living relationship with God – and Luke 9:23 was his text, the same words we heard from Mark this morning, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
“To grow in discipleship”, John wrote, “is to obey a divine command to carry out a task… [a task specific to each follower, in order] …to accomplish a divine purpose (following Jesus). What does this mean in 1988?” Or what does this mean, for us, in 2021?
Firstly, this is what it does not mean!
It does not mean we are to, “imitate slavishly every detail of the life of Jesus….embracing celibacy [or] becoming a carpenter. [This]…would not be living a life of freedom in Christ; it would be living a life of bondage to a new Law….
Neither is our cross our arthritis or our asthma, our grief over loved ones, nor having to work daily with someone whose ways irritate us. These are important experiences…and may even be life changing, but they happen to us, we do not initiate them. Taking up the cross is voluntary. We must will to do it….
[Even so] we may substitute our cross for the one that is set before us. The church in our affluent society has reduced the size of the cross so…it can be worn – rather than borne…. Some take up a pocket cross and deny themselves by making it a shade oversize for any but the deepest pocket or largest handbag. This awkward fit becomes a reminder of the need for a regular devotional life [or association with a church]. But such a cross need never see the light of day…. This…cross [the cross of personal piety] is always a temptation for Christians who occupy prominent positions. It recognises devotion but allows it to be privately maintained rather than publicly declared (especially in the making of institutional policy) with all the potential cost [of such a declaration].
Others take up a larger cross but fit a handle to it. Such a cross can be carried like a briefcase [with a briefcase or a shopping bag in the other hand!] Unlike the pocket cross, this one is visible…. but it is separate from the briefcase and the shopping bag. Faith is separated out from the rest of life…. [Jim Wallis writes] ‘When the theology of faith is torn from the life of faith, what results is an evangelism that has more to do with doctrine than transformation.’
….We might make our briefcases and shopping bags into the shape of the cross. Our faith would then be integrated with the rest of our life and our life transformed by the cross. But….the handle still leaves the carrier in control…..Japanese Christian Kosuke Koyama [writes]…, ‘Handle stands for a means of efficient control…. Technology is controlled power. In that sense it is not dangerous…. a Jesus who carries his cross as one carries a briefcase…. such a Jesus cannot be true to the saving message and the mode of salvation given in the biblical tradition. In the Bible, the cross does not have a handle.’
…A cross shaped briefcase or shopping bag is not an instrument of death. Indeed, one might say that any danger from such a sign of the cross can be safely handled! Such integration of faith and life settles for a gospel of diminished power because the partial retention of control…prevents absolute commitment. We participate in church life, deal honestly with each other, do our jobs conscientiously, and remain faithful to our [partners]; but the secular world’s values are followed in [the rest of our lives].
[The cross that Jesus was speaking of, however, was] a 7.5cm by 12.5cm adzed cypress beam about 2 metres in length, weighing perhaps 14 kgs, and roughly balanced on the right shoulder of the victim. (The upright part of the cross was left at the place of execution and was used countless times.) Such a beam could not be kept in a pocket nor was there a handle which would allow it to be carried comfortably. The condemned [person] was on view for all who cared to look; the beam required both hands to hold it; straddled [one’s] whole being, and demanded [one’s] complete attention.”
So, firstly, Christians of every era must understand that, “the cross was an instrument of the state…. This is the cross that Jesus calls us to take up daily – a constant testing of the customs, beliefs, and practices of our own environment by the truth that is Jesus Christ…. [Not] a once only public declaration of faith before fellow Christians [or] to struggle inwardly with our personal weaknesses [but] …to engage with the principalities and powers present in Christ’s cross: publicly, continuously, in self-denial and, if necessary, at personal risk.”
John gave the example of the Baptists in Russia, who have faced state persecution for many decades. Since the 50s, being open about your faith, meant the possibility of being expelled from university and being unable to find work. Despite this the Baptist movement has grown. The numbers John used, reported at the time, were inflated by people’s enthusiasm, but despite ongoing state harassment there are around 70,000 registered Baptists today and many other unregistered Baptists in Russia.
“Whatever else discipleship involves,” he wrote, “it involves risk…. Do our lives reflect our faith or does our faith reflect our secular values? ….All too often [we] talk of risk-taking in church life when our own lives…display a preoccupation with [wealth and] security.”
Secondly, taking up our cross, “is the call to assume personal responsibility for our lives. Churches cannot be disciples, only individual Christians [can]…. Discipleship reasserts the necessity…for developing a personal response to the social beliefs and culture of our occupations, our use of money, our attitude to financial security, and to family responsibilities….” As Jacques Ellul says, “‘What [this] implies is that Christians should work out their own original approach to any given social situation. I can never insist enough on the need for specificity in every Christian venture in the world.’ ….There is no single action [then] or even range of actions which define taking up one’s cross. Each disciple must identify his/her own cross and then, in obedience, bear it.”
John included the story of Charles Colson, former White House counsel, and founder of the Prison Fellowship, meeting Myrtie Howell. Myrtie was in her early 90s, had significant mobility issues and lived in a dingy one room apartment in a high-rise for elderly people. The move to the apartment a few years before had triggered depression and she had contemplated suicide despite a lifetime of Christian faith. “[But] the words ‘write to prisoners’ kept coming into her mind, so she fought her weariness and depression and wrote…to the only prison known to her, Atlanta Penitentiary:
Dear Inmate, I am a grandmother who love and care for you who are in a place you had not plans to be. My love and sympathy goes out to you. I am willing to be a friend to you in correspondent. If you like to hear from me, write me. I will answer every letter you write. A Christian friend, Grandmother Howell.
She was given seven names, the beginning of a ministry which finally extended to hundreds of prisoners (up to 40 at a time)…. She financed the letters from her meagre pension. Colson met her because of letters… from inmates pleading for prayer for Myrtie when she was seriously ill. She was the only friend many of them ever had.”
And there is John’s own example. His faithfulness to God’s call on his life as a lecturer at teacher’s college, his genuine interest and care for others that I experienced every time our paths crossed, and his work as a homeopath before his death in 2012. One obituary reads: ‘John was considered and considerate in his words, his actions and his decisions. He constantly reminded me that keeping to principles was essential for the well-being of others and for ourselves. [His] counsel was always wise. Above all, I admired John as a man of faith.’
Such examples, “remind us that the size and heaviness of our cross is proportional to our commitment, not to our wisdom, power or social standing…. In M’Cheyne’s memorable sentence, ‘It is not so much great talents God blesses as great likeness to Jesus.’”
Finally, to take up the cross is to choose the risk of cross life over the natural life of revenge.
“The first thing Jesus did on the cross was to forgive his oppressors. That was the foundation of his dying. ‘Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.’ We have to do the same.
…. Polish statesman, dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lech Walesa once said in an interview: “‘Forgiveness is always necessary. I don’t look on anyone as an enemy, though we may have different aims and purposes, and they may regard me as a pest. In my mind I always see the cross of Christ. He seemed to lose everything and fail. But he forgave his enemies just the same. And he didn’t fail – two thousand years later he’s still winning.’
….The last word from the cross is, ‘It is finished!’, but there is a sense in which disciples never have to say it. Jesus gained the victory over the powers of this world at Calvary. This is what was finished. The call to disciples to disregard their safety in taking a full sized cross, [to take up their own cross – not anyone else’s, to take the path of risk over the path of revenge] is in order that we find our true selves. This is the path to growth, not death.
…. [As we] lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim…we become more like him. Growing in discipleship is helping daily to transform the cross from being the property of [evil] into a possession for all [people]” – a possession that grounds and directs us in the way of love.
(Message adapted from John Maitland’s induction address as President of the Baptist Union of NSW, ‘Growing in Discipleship’, given Monday, 19th September 1988.)