“Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” Dear brothers and sisters, this saying of Jesus has a great deal of significance for me personally, and I’ve spent some time thinking about it, so I’d like to share some of my thoughts, poor as they may be, with you.
First, Jesus tells us: Deny yourself. At first glance, we might think that Jesus means that we should deny ourselves some things, food, comfort, pleasure and so on. And that may indeed by what he meant. But I take a slightly different meaning. Perhaps he means that we should deny that we ourselves are the standard by which we should measure the world. Our desires, preferences, opinions, dislikes, or allegiances are not infallible or even true in many cases. We construct ourselves from a collection of such accidental descriptions – I am a young, white, Democrat who hates, absolutely hates, turnips. (That’s not really true for myself, by the way, except for the part about the turnips). We feel safe within such parameters. When we look at our actual outlines, who we really are, we are overwhelmed, and we want to limit ourselves for our own comfort. We try to believe that we aren’t a big mystery, that we are comprehensible, both to ourselves and to others. What Jesus might be saying is that each of the categories by which we describe ourselves reduces us, makes us smaller than the people God created us to be. To deny ourselves means letting go of these labels, these adjectives which define ourselves to ourselves, and open ourselves to the true mystery that lies within us but also reaches beyond us, open ourselves to God who lives in our hearts but who also sustains the whole universe.
Second, take up your cross. It is no accident that we must deny ourselves, strip away what is illusory or trivial about ourselves, before we can take up our cross. When we are still in denial about who we really are, our crosses seem to be annoyances, difficulties, troubles that are assailing us from outside. Gertrude the Great, a nun of the monastery of Helfta in the late 13th and early 14th century, used to talk to Jesus regularly. He was a very pleasant guy and she could share just about anything with him. One day, she spoke about her difficulties with a certain sister who did nothing but complain about all her hardships. Jesus said, “Why don’t you ask her what hardships she would prefer?” I heard another story once, that a man came to Christ carrying his cross, and saying that it was too difficult for him to bear. Christ took him to a room which was filled with crosses and told him to put his cross down and pick up any other one he liked. After spending quite a bit of time trying on one cross after another, the fellow finally picked one out. Christ said, “You know, that’s the cross you came in with.” The point of both of these stories is that hardships, our crosses, are inevitable, and they are individual. They come with life here on earth. Simply to be human is to suffer. To be alive takes a lot of courage, and a lot of perseverance. I saw a movie once about an angel who longed to be human. When he observed the tragedies and losses humans endure, and also the love they experienced, he envied their courage, tenacity, and their beauty. When we lose our illusions about ourselves, we can understand that it is our crosses which are our true identity, our brokenness, our loneliness, our need. We also recognize our dependence on each other and on God. We have compassion for our neighbour because we understand that everyone, regardless of how fortunate or foreign they seem to us, everyone carries a cross. This may sound like bad news, but it’s not. Somewhere else Jesus tells us that his yoke is easy, his burden light. That may seem to contradict the very idea of a cross as being something burdensome, but Jesus’s point is that we don’t have to bear our crosses by ourselves. If we ask, Jesus will help us carry them. He bears most of the weight, not us. He does this out of love for us.
And that brings us to the third part of this saying, “follow me.” Jesus himself is our path and the goal of that path. He helps us along the way, and he meets us at the end. When we deny ourselves, that is, when we see ourselves without illusion, we can begin to see beyond ourselves, to see Christ in us and around us. When we understand what our cross really is, we can begin to enter into a relationship with Christ. We share his cross with him by carrying our own crosses. And when we follow him, we begin to live like him. There is a Christmas hymn called “Good King Wenceslaus.” In it, the king meets a poor man in the dead of winter who is struggling through the snow. The good king says to him, “Put your feet in my footsteps, and the cold won’t bother you as much.” Christ goes in front of us, showing us the way, showing us how to live, showing us a direction, a calling, and a way to move forward. And we do this, and this is crucial, not alone, but with others, with family, with community, with a Church. Now we might wish that we will move always steadily forward, never missing a step or wandering off to the side now and again, but we know from experience that this is not so. Human nature, which is part of the cross we bear, means that we will inevitably stray and perhaps even get lost, despite our best intentions. But that’s OK – Christ knows our human nature, he sees us as we are, not as we pretend to be to others, or to ourselves, but as we are, and loves us as we are. He will leave the 99 and come searching just for us. He once said to Julian of Norwich, “I would suffer death on the cross a thousand times, just for you.” That is how important each single one of us is to him. So as long as we keep trying to follow him, step by step, Eucharist by Eucharist, good deed by good deed, we become more like Christ, until we arrive, at the last day, at his side.