“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.”

(Mark 8:34)

 

This is the time of year which moves relentlessly toward a cross. This is the season when Christians. This is the season when Christians everywhere remember that their Savior “set His face steadfastly to go up to Jerusalem … to suffer many things of the chief priests and elders of the people, to be crucified, to die and be buried, and on the third day to rise again from the dead.” Yes, this is when the cross of Christ dominates the landscape of our religious observances.

George Tyrell wrote to his friend Von Hugel: “What a relief if one could wash his hands forever of the whole business, but there is that strange man upon His cross who drives us back again and again.”

And most disturbing about the cross is this: It is not just the figure of that strange man upon His cross that haunts us, but the uneasy feeling that His hanging there somehow implies a cross for us, (each one). We can’t silence in our thoughts the old hymn’s insistent questions: “Must Jesus bear the cross alone and all the world go free?” For we know the hymn’s clear answer: “No, there’s a cross for everyone; and there’s a cross for me.”

And every Christian neophyte who knows the least smattering about being a disciple of Christ ant following Him, knows by memory from farther back than his own memory runs, those disturbing words of Jesus about cross bearing: “Whosoever would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

On the road to Jerusalem in the gospel accounts, Jesus was concerned about His own cross — but also He was concerned for the disciples understanding that they must bear this cross. But questions come tumbling over each other. What does the cross really mean in Christian life? What is the difference, if any, between the cross of Jesus and the cross each disciple is expected to carry? Surely we have spiritualized the meaning of the cross, but have we spiritualized all the original meaning out of it?

It is here that Simon of Cyrenian affords us such a rich resource for understanding the meaning of the cross for us.

Simon, you know, is the man who bore the cross for Jesus, when our Lord’s strength gave out. Jesus went from Pilate’s Judgment Hall bearing upon his bleeding back the heavy cross on which he was condemned to die. It was the rule of Rome that every criminal sentenced to be crucified bear his own cross to the place of execution. But for Jesus, the long ordeal of the night before with its arrest and endless questionings, and then the scourging and the trials of the day that followed, completely sapped his strength. Under the weight of His cross He stumbled and fell.

What to do?

The record states that when Jesus fell under the weight of the cross, the guard in charge of the crucifixion just stepped over and tapped on the shoulder the first likely passerby and commanded him to get under that cross. By sheer chance, it seemed, the man commandeered was Simon of Cyrene, an on-the-spot victim of this sad emergency. There was nothing for Simon to do but give up what he was doing, forget where he was going, scrap his schedule, and of necessity take up Christ’s cross.

We can imagine Simon’s disgust, his embittered feelings, his frustration. He had come from Cyrene, our modern Tripoli, on the coast of North Africa, immortalized for us in the thrilling song of the Marine Corps — “from the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” Well, Simon came from the shores of Tripoli where he no doubt lived in a Jewish community, and he was in Jerusalem on Holy Pilgrimage. For years Simon may well have saved his money to be able to make this trip to the land of his fathers at the sacred Passover time. No doubt there were relatives he wished to visit in the Holy Land, whose faces he had never seen, but whose names he had heard from his mother’s and father’s lips. Time was short. His resources limited. But now a Roman soldier interrupts his plans. The cross of an unknown condemned man is thrust on his shoulders. “He had come to Jerusalem to realize the cherished ambition of a lifetime, and he found himself walking to Calvary carrying a cross. His heart was filled with bitterness towards the Romans and towards this criminal who had involved him in his crime.” (Wm. Barclay — Commentary on Luke)

Sometimes life handles us in just as autocratic and dictatorial a manner, just as disrespectfully and distastefully. And how hard it is to take. How quickly resentment and bitterness rise. Now I would not suggest that every calamity that befalls one is a cross, nor that every interruption, every shameful disgrace, every unwanted burden someone wants to foist off on us is our cross which we must cheerfully expect, (though sometimes some loose and sloppy Christian thinking comes very close to such a conclusion). Neither would I suggest that when we bear up stoically under adversity we are automatically bearing our cross as good disciples of Jesus Christ.

But I would stoutly affirm that in the mysterious providence of God sometimes these unexpected, unwanted, painful, even shameful experiences life forces upon us, may be our one best chance at immortality and glory. And the spirit with which we take it, not the thing itself, determines whether or not we are bearing the cross of Christ, or our own cross of Christian discipleship.

We show our color as Christians, we prove we are traveling under the banner of the cross, when we take whatever life stretches out to us, whether it be the red carpet of enjoyable hospitality and honor, or the ambulance ride, with sirens screaming, to pain and perhaps defeat — if we take it and use it with a self-denying spirit for God’s purposes of redemptive love. That’s cross bearing.

This is what Simon most surely did, for though the record does not explicitly say so, there are convincing bits of evidence here and there in the New Testament to prove it. The bitterness and resentment that first welled up in Simon’s heart when the cross of the Galilean was laid upon him and his back bent beneath the load and the sweat began to stream down his brow, slowly gave way to another emotion. There was something about this Jesus and the way He was dying for a dream and His complete lack of hostility at those who caused Him pain which melted Simon down, and before he knew it, he was proud that he could be of help and carry that cross.

Mark in his gospel, tells us that Simon was the father of Alexander and Rufus. Now a writer does not identify a man by his sons unless the sons are known to the person or persons to whom he writes. And it is generally accepted that Mark wrote his gospel for the Roman Christian community. Therefore, Alexander and Rufus, the sons of Simon, must have been well known to, or perhaps members of, the Church at Rome. When we turn to the concluding lines of St. Paul’s letter to the Roman Church, we find him sending greetings to Rufus and to his mother who has been like a mother to Paul. So, Paul knows a Rufus at Rome in the church there and he feels so close to Rufus’ mother that he calls her a mother in the faith to him.

See how the picture of the relationships in that family of Simon, the Cyrenian, begins to come clear for us out of the mists of the past? And see how the glory of their permanent and honored place in the New Testament Church roots back to that abrupt and disappointing experience at Jerusalem when Simon was conscripted to bear a shameful cross?

This is universally the surprising experience of those who in strict sincerity take up faithfully their crosses as Christian disciples and follow Jesus. “You strain to leave a competence behind you for your children, and you guard and double guard your endowments and investments. But oh, the pity of it! How often a father’s carefully gathered hoard is only the fund to feed the son’s vices, a means of blasting and squandering his soul.” (D.W. Clow)

But now and then, one like Simon will take up the cross of Jesus, and in bearing it give a new light to lives all about and make of his cross-bearing a power transfusing pipeline to other lives.

When light-horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee, found himself hopelessly in debt, he ran away from the States to the West Indies to escape a prison term. This left Ann Lee, his wife, in poverty and family shame and with all the responsibilities of both a father and a mother to her children. Well, here was a calamity of major proportions! She could have been bitter and resentful toward her husband, her fate, her God. She could have given up in despair and just quit. But not Ann Lee. She gathered in love her little brood about her. She earned a bare subsistence by hard work. She bore with courage and patience and resourceful diligence the trying ordeal that was hers, through those heart-breaking years in Alexandria. But later, admirers of her great son, who stood in awe of General Lee’s strength of soul, his deep loyalty, his power to endure hardship with optimism, his massive courage — if they knew the whole family history would trace all the strength of character in Robert E. Lee to his gallant mother and the way she carried alone her cross in those bleak Alexandrine years.

I know a man whose father failed in health just in his prime, just when his children needed most to have him out in the business and professional world and providing for them and their education. He had to give up his beloved profession. He had to accept the unwanted role of a patient when he had been trained to be a physician. He who had prided himself on providing for others had to accept the provision of his own children for his daily needs. The children had it hard. But they made their way. They got their education. They made their marks, and one of that physician’s sons said to me of his father and that illness unto apparent defeat: “I never once heard him complain. He never lost his faith or failed to offer up his prayers of thanksgiving for the family to the day he died. And I would rather he had left me that heritage than a million dollars.”

Oh, how fruitful is the baring of the holy cross! Here is absolutely nothing in all the world like it. Thomas A Kempis in his Imitation of Christ writes: “For there is no other way unto life, and unto true inward peace, but the way of the holy cross. Go where thou wilt, seek whatsoever thou wilt, thou shalt not find a higher way above, nor a safer way below, than the way of the holy cross … Take up, therefore thy cross and follow Jesus.”

Now, for us in our own particular circumstances, do we have thrust upon us some onerous responsibility, some unexpected burden we don’t like, some illness, some loss, some family shame, or injustice of society? Well, what are our emotions, our attitudes about our lot in life at this moment? Are we rebellious, bitter? Do these attitudes and emotions of ours need changing? Mere “acceptance” as the psychologists speak of it, is not enough for the Christian and his cross-bearing. It must be accepted joyfully, as an opportunity for releasing redemptive love and glorifying God.

Can we, in the same set of circumstances in which we now find ourselves, still be the same people, but with a new spirit, find ourselves transformed, and become an avenue of transforming power, not only for that small situation that is ours, but stretching out from it for the world?

“O Cross, that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from thee,

I lay in dust life’s glory dead,

And from the ground there blossoms red

Life that shall endless be.”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Ever living and ever present God, our Heavenly Father, we turn our wayward thoughts to the remembrance of Thy many mercies and our flitting attention we focus on Him in whom Thou didst reveal Thyself in fullest form, Jesus Christ, Thy Son. We would know Thee and worship Thee through contemplation of Jesus and devotion poured out to Him. For in Him Thou doest come to us treading all the dark road along which our humanity has wearily traveled, giving us joy by His sorrow and life by His death. Oh grant us the grace to accept what Thou dost come to give us in Christ. May we receive the gift of Thy  loving forgiveness He brings us by His suffering and death; the new spiritual life He bestows by faith; the new crusade unto abundant living to which He calls us by taking up our cross and following Him.

In His name, we present unto Thee our prayers and petitions: We ask for strength this week to carry our burdens, and for Thy patience in dealing with our waywardness, Lord, and for patience in our hearts to bear with those whose ways are irksome to us and whose words are hard for us to take. We ask for resiliency of spirit to rise again when life knocks us down. We pray for grace to accept the things that happen to us that we don’t like and which we cannot understand or change but must endure. We plead for power to love the sinner who sins against us, however we may despise his ways.

O Lord most merciful, language fails us when we seek to utter the depth of our need and the desperate plight of our situation. Yet Thou art sensitive to our souls’ wordless groanings and we rely upon the promise that Thou art ready and willing to do more abundantly for us than we could ask or think through Jesus Christ our Lord, (who taught us to pray saying): Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the High God? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

INVOCATION

“O Lord our God, who hast bidden the light to shine out of darkness, and hast wakened us again to praise Thy goodness and ask for Thy grace: accept now in Thy endless mercy, the sacrifice of our worship and thanksgiving, and grant unto us all such requests as may be wholesome for us. Make us to be children of the light and of the day, and heirs of Thy everlasting inheritance. Pour out upon us the riches of Thy mercy, so that we, redeemed in soul and body, and steadfast in faith, may over praise Thy wonderful and holy name, through Jesus Christ our Lord, whose prayer He taught His disciples we now pray: Our Father, etc.”