The Cost of Great Love
When Jesus says to Peter and the disciples that they must take up their cross and follow him, he was saying that speaking truth, and living faithfully for others, often comes at great cost.
In his weekly blog, Dean Andrew McGowan of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale offered thoughts on how to read Jesus’ words about taking up our cross. In the gospel passage we read last week, the story from Mark is the very first time that Jesus mentions the cross. Until then, the disciples could be forgiven for thinking that this was simply a movement about healing and deepening their relationship with God.
The cross, McGowan writes, was a particular means of state control. It was how the Roman empire punished the underclass, a means of state violence that kept the status-quo in place. Jesus was saying to his friends that fidelity to God and neighbor could come at a great cost, and that the state would likely bring great violence to bear on them. This was the cross they would have to carry.
This appeared in the lectionary just a few days after the death of Alexander Navalny in a Russian prison, and I mentioned that in my Sunday sermon. Navalny had been a fierce atheist, but later in life had become a Christian; he had said in interviews that it offered him a moral clarity that no doubt helped him to continue his work.
Navalny’s heroic witness and sacrifice is as tragic as it is inspiring. His imprisonment and death is a vivid example of what it means to bear a cross, to give up safety and security to care for the world that God created.
His courage can give us hope, as it shines the light that, once kindled, cannot be extinguished.
The Very Rev. Bernard J. Owens