Bearing the Cross
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Bearing the Cross
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Bearing the Cross (March 11, 2007) Third in a series on The Christian Life, as taught by John Calvin and described in a book by the same name by the late John Leith. “Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24 Today’s NIV. We come now to the third in our Lenten series of John Calvin’s teachings on the Christian Life. Two weeks ago we discussed the theme “You are Not Your Own”. This leads naturally to the idea of Self-denial, which we discussed last week. Self-denial means the death of self-centeredness and the positive side of that is that we make room then for love of neighbor and full commitment to God. Each of us just has so much of the self to go around, you might say, and if we are self-centered there is simply not going to be much chance to focus on neighbor and God. There are actually many examples around us of people who practice self-denial– parents devoting themselves to their children, service men and women suffering for their country, firefighters and police saving and protecting people for poor pay, nurses overworked in our hospitals, teachers in schools working hard for their students – and there are many other examples. So it is not as if we don’t know about self-denial around. In our me-oriented society, it just doesn’t get the attention or respect it deserves. Now today we come to the natural point after self-denial and that is Bearing the Cross. In Jesus’ instructions to the disciples these two were together: “Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” When Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount he told his followers: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” In this beatitude, Jesus clearly connected cross-bearing with preparation for heaven. The gospels record that when Jesus began to talk like this many people began to turn away. This is not a popular line of thought. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. Most of us want an easy life and we want religion to help us with that. When it doesn’t we often raise questions about it. Self-denial and cross bearing are not exactly themes which will pack churches. They sound negative. But in Calvin these are far from negative. Those who bear the cross will find themselves. “Those who seek to save their lives will lose them,” Jesus said, “and those who lose their lives will find them.” Calvin taught that afflictions may come as a sign of God’s displeasure and as a chastisement, but they may also come to increase our faith and draw us closer to God. The history of the Christian church shows that where laxity and an easy life often lead to dissipation and indolence, in the midst of difficulty the church often thrives. One of history’s lessons is: The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Jesus was not a general who stood in the back and told his soldiers to go forward, but he was in the front, you might say, leading the charge. His words totally matched his deeds. He not only spoke about bearing the cross he bore the cross himself. As he said, “greater love has no one than this than to lay down his life for his friends.” “The Son of Man,” he said, “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” As Calvin said, Christ’s life “was nothing but a kind of perpetual cross.” When we bear a cross – calamity, sacrifice, struggle, hardship, loss – we are partakers of that perpetual cross of Christ. St. Paul wrote: “That I may know him, and the power of resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.” Calvin did not think of cross bearing as some kind of blind harness, to use the words of Dr. Leith, in which we are to show no emotions. Unlike the Stoics, whose teachings were well known in the ancient word and who taught “a stiff upper lip”, Jesus himself wept at the grave of Lazarus and experienced sorrow for the people of Jerusalem. So we too are not above feeling, but the crucial difference is that affliction and hardship are not allowed to triumph over faith. As Dr. Leith says, “In the midst of tears, faith must reign with confidence in God’s goodness and with the sure hope that the salvation which is begun shall be carried to its conclusion.” This is an entirely different way of looking at hardship and difficulty. I was reading recently about the extraordinary trials the Pilgrims went through on their way to America in the “Mayflower” and in their first winter, when they lost half their number. The Pilgrims were not the first European settlers to America, you know. A settlement was founded in Jamestown, Virginia a little earlier. Its purpose was not religious freedom, however, but commerce, specifically tobacco. Scholars have often asked why the Jamestown settlement failed but the one in Plymouth succeeded. There are many reasons but one which cannot be overlooked is not what was outside the settlers but what was inside. The Jamestown settlement’s purpose was money. The Pilgrims were only partially interested in making a financial go of it here. Instead, they were interested in serving God. In fact, they left a far easier life in Holland because they feared what a life without difficulties would do to their faith. In England they feared for their lives, but in tolerant Holland they feared for their souls. So they left. The hardships and trials they experienced on their journey to the new world and in their first years were for them the cross they bore for Christ. As the Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl said, those who have the why of life can endure any how. When the why of life is being a disciple of Jesus who himself went to the cross, – “you are not your own” -- any circumstance in life and anything life throws at you can bring meaning. St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: “That I may know Him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.” One of the best selling books of all time is John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The Christian journey is a pilgrimage with many tribulations and calamities along the way, but at the end there is a celestial victory made sweeter by the trials which have been overcome. Of all the stories in the Old Testament the story of Joseph has perhaps had the most to teach Christians in their spiritual life. We studied it in our Confirmation class a few weeks ago. Joseph suffered many calamities: thrown into a pit, stripped of his clothing, sold into slavery in Egypt, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, thrown into prison, languishing for years in prison, on and on. There were many times he must have been close to despair. The worst perhaps was when he thought he would be released after describing the meaning of dreams to fellow inmates and being promised by them they would tell Pharaoh about him. But he was there two more years. But in the end, looking at his brothers who had come down to Egypt, Joseph says, “you meant it for evil, but God intended it for good.” The class lesson included this poem by an unknown author: “Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24 Today’s NIV. John Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life, by John Leith. The Christian Life: John Calvin. By John Leith. Harper and Row, 1984.
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