Daily Reading for September 3
The expression “bearing one’s cross” has become a feeble, pious commonplace, a trite metaphor for resigning oneself to some unavoidable burden or misfortune. . . . The image of taking up the cross was not some esoteric symbol for Jesus, but a horrible reality of daily life in an enemy-occupied country. No one could travel about Palestine for very long without coming across pitiful processions of condemned criminals, naked, bloody, dragging the crossbars to the places of execution. . . . Why were the condemned forced to take up their crosses and drag them through the streets on the way to the killing fields? No doubt it intensified their degradation to be subjected to the abuse and loathing of the passersby, and it also gave the public an opportunity to disown the victims. As they pelted the victims with filth and jeers, the law-abiding populace could be strengthened in their own sense of rectitude. In this way, between the criminals about to be nailed to the crosses and the decent citizens going about their business a great gulf was fixed.
On the road to Caesarea Philippi Jesus told his disciples that if they wanted to know who he really was, they had to accept that he was the Son of man who was going to suffer. He intended to cross over the gulf, to leave once and for all the company of the upright and decent and to join those under sentence of death. Peter reacted as if Jesus had kicked him in the stomach, and Jesus came back at him with equal vehemence: “Get behind me, Satan!” If Peter tries to hold him back from this crossing over, he will become the very devil—Jesus’ adversary, not his disciple. So they had better get this right. It was not for Jesus alone; anyone who wanted to follow him into true life had to cross over, too. Anyone who wanted to be identified with Jesus and find life with him had to join him in the procession of the condemned, the dying, and the rejected.
Six days after this bombshell Peter, James, and John had the experience we call the Transfiguration. Three days after Jesus actually had crossed over, crucified on Skull Hill with two criminals, God raised him from death, confirming once and for all that the business of crossing over, of taking up one’s cross, is the real way into life.
From “Crossing Over” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).