Turn in your Bible to Mark 8.31-38. We find that Jesus and his companions have traveled roughly 30 miles north from Capernaum to the town of Caesarea Philippi – a town that would be considered to be as pagan as it gets.  It was a pilgrimage destination for Romans and Greeks who would go there to worship the Greek God Pan.  While strolling about the city dedicated to this Greek god, Jesus asks his disciples who people in general thought he was. Some said John the Baptist, others said, Elijah, or perhaps one of the great prophets. Peter true to form, a guy who doesn’t have an unspoken thought, blurts out, “You’re the Christ!” 

Looking good Peter!  It looks like he’s getting it, doesn’t it?  And this is where we pick up.

Mark 8.31-38

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”^[1]

Our text has Jesus going from preaching to meddling. It contains some of the hardest sayings we have from our Lord.  First, there is Jesus who tells Peter, the one person who finally articulated out loud who Jesus is, to shut his mouth and get behind him! Peter thought he saw Jesus for who Jesus really was, but he missed the point. Jesus had to verbally slap him up the side of his head and say, “Peter, you sound like the evil one confusing the way the world does things and the way God works.

Second, however, our text has one of the most well-known and most difficult sayings of Jesus; it’s not really a saying so much as that of an imperative of Jesus to all disciples. We discover that Jesus is not waxing eloquently on the ideals of a spiritual life; Jesus is drawing a line in the sand and says, “If you are going to follow me, you’ve got to do one thing and once you cross it, there’s no going back!” Like when Hernando Cortez back in the 1,500’s landed in what is today, Mexico, he told his soldiers to burn their boats because there was no turning back This is what it means to pick up our cross.

Friends, what is the one thing he is requiring of you and me?  It’s the command to pick up our own cross and follow him. This one requirement moves our faith from simply believing in Jesus to believing Jesus.

In Tacoma, Washington, I had a member of the church I pastored who helped found the church decades earlier by turning a Sunday school in an old tomato shed on the side of a hill into a church of 1,000 strong. Mel was always trying to get people to see Jesus and come to church and if he ever met you, he would come up and introduce himself and then press this tiny little pocket cross into your hand. He would remind you that God loves you and there are a group of people at the church who want to be the physical arms of God and love you, too!  And though I cherish the little cross he gave me years ago, it got me to thinking.

Too often, when we think of carrying our cross, we oftentimes think it’s the size of a cross that easily slips into our pockets. We think to ourselves, “I’ll carry it along with me if I remember to pull it out of the bowl where I keep my car keys as I leave in the morning.” I’m not sure this is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us to be cross-bearers. Jesus is not asking us to slip convenient crosses into our pockets, he is telling us in the imperative to pick up the full weight of Christ-Followership and imitate the way he actually lived.  But let’s pause and reflect for a moment: If we’re honest, we’ll admit we are not always certain about what cross-bearing actually is.

Many of us have heard the expression, “Oh, I’ve got my cross to bear.”  It’s usually said by someone when he or she is going through a hard time or an illness.  Recovering from a car accident is painful and it’s your cross to bear. Going through a long and uncomfortable medical treatment is seen as bearing the pain of the burden of a cross. Yes, God can and does speak through difficult experiences like those, but my friends, those are not the crosses Jesus is talking about. You see, the cross Jesus is talking about is the cross we each to have to consciously and willingly pick up. “A cross” is not something passive that happens to us; it is something we choose to deliberately grab hold of and lift.  So, what is Jesus talking about?

In the first century, the cross represented death. It was used by the State to publicly humiliate the offender in front of the people he or she lived with for the sole purpose of instilling fear and obedience to the State. The offenders would be stripped and forced to carry their own instruments of execution to a prominent public spot so people could not help but see the gruesome spectacle. Death on a cross was caused by exposure and asphyxiation and normally lasted several days. So, is Jesus telling Peter, telling you and me, we must become martyrs for the Christian cause? No, although some in history have had to take that path. What is Jesus asking us to do?

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians church, he says that we are to take off our “old self” with its pre-Christian practices and worldview and put on our “new self”, the new life in Christ, which is being renewed to become the image, literally a living icon of the Creator God! Though it may not necessarily mean literal death for most of us, it is a death nonetheless. As German pastor/professor/ethicist Dietrich Bonhoeffer in chapter two of his seminal book, The Cost of Discipleship, wrote, “When Jesus calls a man [sic], he bids him to come and die.”

What is Jesus asking us to do exactly?  He’s asking you and me, he’s asking us a church, to put to death our current ways of relating and responding to the world as the rest of the world currently does. It means putting to death any old assumptions and prejudices we have.  It means putting to death the notion that our money, possessions, or 401K’s are actually ours. He is telling us we must shatter the notion God is wrapped up in the flag or of any one political party so that we, like Peter, don’t become the Satan, the deceiver in the world, and muddy up what it means to live in healthy, Christocentric Christ-Followership. It means we put to death any sense of entitlement we think we are owed or deserve. It means to put to death our overcharged sense of self-importance. It means standing buck naked before the Living God totally exposed and vulnerable relying on God’s sovereign love and grace alone.

Now, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that our discipleship in following the Lord and imitating Jesus is oftentimes more guided by convenience as opposed to sacrifice. So, let’s make it real:  When was the last time you and I really sacrificed anything for Christ besides inconvenience?

Let me provide you a very rough, literal reading of verses 34 and 35.  Jesus says,

If anyone comes after me and wants to continue the work I’m doing, then he or she must cut off all relationship to the old way of living and forget he or she even lived that way.  Then, a person must pick up a cross moment-by-moment and come along behind me.  For whoever wants to make his or her life whole and complete must utterly destroy the old way of living, but whoever wants to destroy their old way of living for me and for the good news will be made whole and complete!

Yes, that’s pretty radical.

The question before us is this: Does our life reflect that we are putting to death our old way of life and are being clothed with the majesty of our Lord? Are we like Peter telling Jesus to conform to the world as we know and experience it or are we willing to cut all ties with worldly ways and follow and live like Christ? 

Dr. Wiley Stephens, the Methodist preacher who married Kelly and me over 40 years ago preached in a sermon, “I have a question for you. God invested his Son’s life for you. Has your life, has the life of this church, made any interest on that investment?”^[2] Cross-bearing earns interest on Christ’s investment. Do each of our lives, the life of First Pres, add accumulated interest and dividends on the principal Jesus died to give us? If not, we are carrying our crosses conveniently in our pockets

So, beloved, what must you, what must I let go of and put down to pick up the cross and make our lives whole and complete in Christ? As we make our way through the season of Lent plodding towards Easter, I want Jesus’ words to get inside our heads and doggedly gnaw on us. Let us hear his words as questions to each of us: Patrick, how have you denied yourself, picked up your cross, and followed me? How have you lost your life for my sake and for the proclamation of the gospel? You see, these aren’t questions we will be asked at the Pearly Gates one day; they are questions Jesus is asking you and me today. Let us pray…

[1] The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[2] The Rev. Dr. Wiley Stephens, Dunwoody Methodist Church, Dunwoody, Georgia. Read the Fine Print, Mark 8.27-38, 15^th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19), September 14, 2003.  Accessed on 2/29/12 at http://day1.org/498-read_the_fine_print.  I modified Dr. Stephen’s last sentence to fit the context at FPC.