Mark 8:34: Taking Up the Cross?

As commonly applied, this is not a very hard saying. As originally intended, it is very hard indeed; no saying could be harder.

As commonly applied, the expression is used of some bodily disability, some unwelcome experience, some uncongenial companion or relative that one is stuck with: "This is the cross I have to bear," people say. It can be used in this watered-down way because its literal sense is remote from our experience. In the West capital punishment is now rare or a thing of the past, and it is difficult even to paraphrase the saying in terms of ordinary experience.

There was a time when capital punishment was carried out publicly. The condemned criminal was led through the streets on foot or dragged on a cart to the place of execution, and the crowds who watched this grim procession knew what lay at the end of the road. A person on their way to public execution was compelled to abandon all earthly hopes and ambitions. At that time these words of Jesus might have been rendered thus: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him be prepared to be led out to public execution, following my example."

In all three Synoptic Gospels these words follow the account of Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus' first warning about his impending passion, Peter's expostulation and the rebuke which it drew forth from Jesus. It is as though he said to them, "You still confess me to be the Messiah? You still wish to follow me? If so, you should realize quite clearly where I am going and understand that by following me you will be going there too." The Son of Man must suffer; were they prepared to suffer with him? The Son of Man faced the prospect of violent death; were they prepared to face it too? What if that violent death proved to be death on a cross? Were they prepared for that?

The sight of a man being taken to the place of public crucifixion was not unfamiliar in the Roman world of that day. Such a man was commonly made to carry the crossbeam, the patibulum, of his cross as he went to his death. That is the picture which Jesus' words would conjure up in the minds of his hearers. If they were not prepared for that outcome to their discipleship, let them change their minds while there was time--but let them first weigh the options in the balances of the kingdom of God: "for whoever wants to save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it" (Mk 8:35).

Many, perhaps most, of those who heard these words proved their truth.Not all of them were actually crucified. This, we know, was Peter's lot; the first of those present to suffer death for Jesus' sake, James the son of Zebedee, was beheaded (Acts 12:2). but this is what is meant by "taking up the cross"--facing persecution and death for Jesus' sake.

When Luke reproduces this saying he amplifies it slightly: "he must deny himself and take up his cross daily" (Luke 9:23). A later disciple of Jesus, one who was not present to hear these words in person, entered fully into their meaning and emphasizes this aspect: "I die every day," Paul writes (1 Cor 15:31), meaning "I am exposed to the risk of death every day, and that for Jesus' sake." He says that he and his fellow apostles "always carry around in our body the death of Jesus" and explains himself by saying that "we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body" (2 Cor 4:10-11). In another place he refers to "the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" for whose sake he has suffered the loss of everything, and tells how his consuming ambition is "to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death" (Phil 3:8, 10). As a Roman citizen, Paul was not liable to be crucified, but he knew by experience what it meant to "take up his cross daily" and follow Jesus.

Jesus' words about the necessity of denying oneself if one wishes to be his disciple are to be understood in the same sense. Here too is a phrase that has become unconscionably weakened in pious phraseology. Denying oneself is not a matter of giving up something, whether for Lent or for the whole of life; it is a decisive saying no to oneself, to one's hopes and plans and ambitions, to one's likes and dislikes, to one's nearest and dearest, for the sake of Christ. It was so for the first disciples, and it is so for many disciples today. But if this is how it is to be taken--and this is how it was meant to be taken--it is a hard saying indeed.

Yet to some disciples it might be encouraging at the same time--to those actually being compelled to suffer for their Christian faith. The Gospel of Mark was probably written in the first instance for Christians in Rome who were enduring unforeseen and savage persecution under the Emperor Nero in the aftermath of the great fire of A.D. 64. For some of them this persecution involved literal crucifixion. It was reassuring for them to be reminded that their Lord himself had said that this kind of experience was only to be expected by his disciples. If they were suffering for his name's sake, this meant that they were sharers in his suffering; it meant also that they were truly his disciples and would be acknowledged as such by him in the presence of God.