Taking up your cross

"...Jesus universalises the principle that is at stake:

'If anyone would come after me,' he says, 'he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it' (Matthew 16 v 24-25).

"This expression 'to take up one's cross' is not an idiom by which to refer to some trivial annoyance - an ingrown toenail, perhaps, or a toothache, or an awkward in-law: 'We all have our crosses to bear.' No, in the first century, that sort of interpretation would have been impossible. In the first century it was as culturally unthinkable to make jokes about crucifixion as it would be today to make jokes about Auschwitz.

"To take up your cross does not mean to move forward with courage despite the fact that you lost your job or your spouse. It means you are under sentence of death; you are taking up the horizontal cross-member on your way to the place of crucifixion. You have abandoned all hope of life in this world. And then, Jesus says, and only then, are we ready to follow him.

"Is this not universal Christian teaching? It is in dying that we live; it is in denying ourselves that we find ourselves; it is in giving that we receive. Paul understands the same principle when he says, in 2 Corinthians 12, that he has learned to rejoice when he is weak, for when he is weak, he experiences God's strength.

"All of this, of course, was first of all supremely exemplified in the Lord Jesus. In shame, ignominy, and powerlessness he died in suffering and agony and rose in power to become the risen temple of God, the living meeting place between God and his people.

"The mockers laugh at their perception of the irony of the situation: Jesus made such outrageous claims to power, claiming he could destroy the temple and build it again in three days, when in fact he dies in the throes of the most abysmal weakness. But we see a deeper irony: the weakness the mockers find amusing is Jesus' own way to power, the way to the resurrection, the way to functioning as the mighty temple of the living God.

"Although our own death to self-interest never functions with the same atoning significance of the death of Jesus, the same principle applies in us: in dying we live, in denying ourselves we find ourselves, as we take up our cross and follow Jesus."

Don Carson "Scandalous: The cross and resurrection of Jesus"