Sunday after the Exaltation of the Cross. Octoechos Tone 7; Holy Martyr Sophia, and Her Three Daughters Faith, Hope and Love.
Galatians 2:16-20; Mark 8:34-9:1.
Read Mark 8:34-9:1
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Sometimes figures of speech don’t mean what we think they mean. We sometimes say that we or someone else has a “cross to bear.” By that we usually mean an ongoing condition, circumstance, or relationship that is difficult or painful which we must accept and be changed by through enduring it. But is that what Jesus meant in today’s gospel reading when he said, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me?”
Immediately before saying this, Jesus had to rebuke Peter for insisting that Jesus would not suffer, be rejected, killed, and rise again – this after Peter was given the gift of faith to confess that Jesus is the Christ. But Peter’s human nature still needed to be changed by grace to embrace, follow, and become like the kind of Christ that Jesus is rather the kind that Peter and we often want him to be.
Peter, the disciples, and the multitude knew all too well what was happening for anyone who they saw “take up his cross” – their life as they knew it was over; they weren’t coming back. Jesus was clueing them into the fact that his life, as the disciples knew it, was over but that he would be coming back. He then elaborated that the only way for us to come back from our life being over is to go the same way as Jesus did to the end of it, as a cross-carrier in identification with him.
So, yes, what Jesus meant can include what we mean when we say that we or someone else has a “cross to bear,” but it is not to be limited to that – Jesus means for it to include our whole life.
Bible References
Mark 8:34-9:1