“Take up your cross and follow me,” Jesus says. This is a terribly difficult instruction to understand, for us today. When I hear it, I often think Jesus is asking me to work myself to death—to feed and heal and give, to volunteer until it kills me. But thanks to some colleagues that I study the Bible with, today I have a new appreciation of Jesus’ call to take up our cross and follow him.
It
is back to school time and the only school supplies I have been asked to provide
for my child is a backpack. He’s been
given a backpack in the last year, so I’ve been saving it. The two weeks before school, we got it out
and he practiced wearing it, because he was so excited to start school after a
year and a half. We ordered a Sonic the
Hedgehog patch and I both ironed it on and sewed it on, knowing we’d want to
keep it attached. Each day my son grabs
his backpack and mask, the last things before leaving for school. All the kids have different backpacks of
different sizes. Some hold a coat, a
lunch, some books, and any number of other things. Other backpacks are small and light. Some are large and empty and others are full.
Taking
up your cross, made me think of taking up your backpack. Jesus carried the cross on his back. It was a burden that he carried. Backpacks usually carry necessary and useful
tools to use during the day, but we all know that sooner or later it gets full
of things that are heavy and unnecessary that we end up dragging all over the
place.
We
all carry around our baggage, our backpacks.
Some of us have small backpacks.
Sometimes we have little capacity to carry very much because of the
tools we’ve been given, the backpack given to us. Some of us are carrying heavy loads—some have
become widows or widowers or lost everything in a divorce, others have health
concerns that weigh on us or have close family members who are incarcerated or
suffer from mental illness. We try to
look strong carrying our backpack and not let people see how heavy it is—it is
our cross to bear, after all. But
sometimes we just collapse because it is too much.
This
week our packs are filled to bursting.
We carry the trauma of the September 11 terrorist attacks on this 20th
anniversary. We continue to grieve as a
nation and feel the reverberations. We
carry the trauma of the storm and fires from a year ago, when the sky was
orange and brown and the flames were in Oregon City and Canby and coming closer. We may know someone who evacuated or lost a home. A million acres burned. This week we send our kids and grandkids to
school with the Delta variant spreading.
We all know someone who has contracted the virus and many of us know at
least one person who has died of it. And we put our church activities on hold
and go back to church on the computer and I wonder if this is for three weeks
or three months or more? We just made it
through a year of isolation and quarantine—not getting to see family, not going
on those planned trips, not touching each other or being touched, not singing
together, always vigilant. Our burdens
are heavy.
When
Peter says to Jesus, “You are the Messiah,” he is partly referring to the size
of Jesus’ backpack—his capacity to carry.
He knew Jesus is powerful. He
knew Jesus can carry a lot, as the Messiah.
He is only surprised when he finds out what Jesus intends to put in that
backpack. He could fill it with castles
and thrones and riches and armies. He
could make anyone do anything he asked.
This is like the temptation in the wilderness—Peter is thinking in his
mind what he’d do if he was carrying the pack that Jesus held—he could leap
from high towers, make bread out of stones, and be in charge of cities and
nations. There’s so much to grab on this
shopping spree, when the shelves are full of everything your heart desires and
your cart is unlimited in size.
Jesus
isn’t even going down that aisle. He
tells Peter, that’s the human perspective.
Let’s look at things the way God looks at them. Jesus is filling his pack with suffering and
death and shame and the cross. So far, he’s
been filling it with food and medicine and time devoted to people that others
see as a waste of time. The disciples
are curious. They can see the value in
this ministry so far, especially if it is going to get Jesus a parade and an
uprising that will put him in power.
Now, Jesus says he is
going to the cross. This is his first
prediction of his death. This statement
would have been a terrible shock to his Disciples, and probably just as
confusing to them as it is to us. What
does it mean that Jesus is going to the cross?
His disciples have not minded following him all this way, feeding and
healing people. They felt good doing
good, handing out bandaids and temporary fixes for people’s problems. But for Jesus to go to the cross, is Jesus
going to confront the powers that bring hunger and illness and suffering and
death, to people in the first place.
He’s going to take action to unburden especially burdened people from
the heavy loads they carry. He’s going
to confront the systems that create hunger—hoarding people do and the lack of
community—and he’s going to lighten that burden for people. He’s going to confront the systems that make
people sick and keep them isolated, so they won’t have to carry that burden
anymore.
The temporary rulers of
this world have filled their backpacks with money and policies and procedures
to keep themselves in power. They have
filled their bags with laws that keep people from challenging their power. They have filled them with ways to make sure
people stay just poor enough that they don’t have time or energy to challenge
the systems that hurt people. They have
filled their packs with favors for people who are rich to keep their power. They have set their sights on human things—self-preservation
and comfort for themselves and they will go to great lengths to keep filling
their packs with these things. They’ve
even filled their packs with the weapon of suffering and shame, the cross, to
control the masses with threats of terrible violence and torture and death.
Those of us who enjoy
luxuries and privileges are unfortunately part of this system of
oppression. We like the laws that make
it so we can have 2 houses when someone else only has one, the laws that say
what’s mine is mine and I deserve it. We
like the laws that say I can have as much of anything I want, as long as I can
afford it, even if that means another person doesn’t get paid enough to live
on. We have our sights set on human
things because we like to be comfortable.
We are invested in the world as it is and we don’t particularly want to
see things change.
Jesus does not see things
the human way. He has his sights on
godly things. He knows that even these
powerful leaders are clinging to something that is temporary—we will all eventually
lose power and die. We create a whole
host of problems because of what we have hoarded in our packs. We have destabilized society trying to get
more and more. The suffering we have
caused has a ripple effect of suffering which is contrary to the vision of
peace and flourishing that God has in mind.
Jesus going to the cross
is him taking on the oppressive system—the system of prisons and the death
penalty, the systems that crush people and destroy life, the building of bigger
barns, of charging interest, of paying low wages. That’s what the cross is—a mechanism to hurt
and control, wielded by the state, by the powerful, to keep systems of
injustice from being challenged. Jesus asks
us, as his Disciples to follow him, not just to put bandaids on people’s pain
and hunger, but to take up our cross and examine our own investment in the
systems and then challenge the systems that cause hunger and illness and
suffering in the first place. These are
systems that we take for granted—that’s just the way things are. These systems don’t want to be changed and
many of them are supported by people in power because they keep certain people comfortable. When you challenge a system like that, there
are consequences—first, you are giving up your comfort and privilege so being
uncomfortable is a consequence, but also people put pressure on you not to rock
the boat. They might attack your
character, and you may well encounter physical danger. That’s what it means to take up your cross—to
challenge the systems that oppress on behalf of your neighbor in need and to
face the consequences of doing so.
We can do this the human
way—get bigger and bigger backpacks and fill them with the things we like. It isn’t satisfying and it destroys life for
other people and for this world God has created. Or we can do this the divine way—we use our capacity
to help people and especially to look at the root causes of these problems in
our world that absolutely crush people and give of ourselves to expose these
root causes and allow God to work through us to change them.
I may be a little biased,
but I believe that church can increase our capacity—the size of our backpack to
carry heavy burdens together. Living in
Christian community stretches us and our backpacks. We hear stories that challenge our
assumptions, we see different ways of doing things, and we see others making
sacrifices that make it easier to get out of the cycle of trying to impress
other people and gathering more comforts around us. And we can band together in community to put
pressure on the powers that be and the systems that oppress. I like watching this happen in the emergency
preparedness committee. These folks
realize that in an emergency there are going to be a lot of people carrying
heavy burdens—rich and poor alike—and being prepared may mean that instead of
being crushed, people will know what to do to look out for their neighbor,
convert their restaurant into a place to feed the community, convert their
church yard into a safe haven for pets, house and clothe displaced
persons. This work takes the
dehumanizing situation of a disaster and turns it into an opportunity for new
life, for sharing, for being neighborly.
The truth is, we’ve had
it comparatively easy. Around the world
there are people who have faced war their entire lives, who have survived
famines, fled and become refugees, lost family members to preventable diseases. We’re just coming to see how good we had it
and what we took for granted. And
because of what we have done to our planet, we may never know the stability and
safety we once knew. There may not be a
going back to normal. This is the pack
we are all carrying and the fact is, we need each other, we need to do the work
that we’ve been putting off, the work of challenging injustice, because it’s
coming back to bite us. Our world is
unravelling. And when we do take up our
cross, and challenge that injustice, we fight the good fight and build
community and put our lives on the line, we eventually find that our load does
become lighter and our neighbor’s load does become lighter because God is
creating through us a more life-giving, just world.
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