Take up your cross

A word for the week

Take up your cross. We have worn that phrase so smooth it has almost stopped meaning anything; people say it now about a nagging back or a difficult coworker, some burden they are stuck with. Put it back in the mouth of the man who first said it, to people who had watched the Romans crucify men along the roadside, and it lands like a blow. The cross was not an inconvenience. It was the instrument of a public, humiliating death. To take up your cross was to pick up the crossbeam and carry it to the place where you would die on it. That is the picture Jesus hands them, and then he says, this is what following me is.

But watch how he unfolds it, because it turns into the opposite of what it first sounds like. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, he says, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. This is the sentence the whole passage turns on, and it is one of the truest things ever said about being human. Clutch your life, hoard it, arrange everything around protecting yourself and getting yours, and you will find it slipping through your fingers anyway, thinner and smaller the tighter you grip. Everyone has met someone like that: careful, defended, always self-first, and somehow shrinking, a little less alive every year. The self curved entirely around itself is a starved thing.

And everyone has also met the opposite: the person who spends themselves on others and is somehow more alive for it, not less. The parent up all night with a sick child. The friend who gives without keeping a ledger. The one who forgot to protect themselves because they were busy loving someone, and found, to their surprise, that they were more themselves than ever. That is not a trick of words. It is the deepest law of the way. You become yourself by giving yourself away. You keep your life only by spending it.

So the cross is not suffering for its own sake, and Jesus is not romanticizing pain. The cross is what it costs to stop living for yourself. It is the death of the small, defended, self-first self, so that a larger life can come up in its place. Every real act of love has a little of that death in it, the daily giving-up of what you wanted for the sake of someone else. Take up your cross does not mean go looking for misery. It means stop guarding the little self at all costs, and start pouring it out.

Then he asks the question that cuts through everything the world tells you to chase: what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? You could win it all, every prize on offer, and lose the one thing that was actually you. It is the worst trade there is, and people make it a little at a time, selling off pieces of themselves for advancement, or comfort, or the good opinion of people they do not even like.

He is not asking you to hate your life. He is asking you to stop clutching it, because the clutching is the very thing killing it. Open your hands. Spend yourself on God and on the people in front of you. That is the cross, and strangely, unbelievably, it is also the way to the only life worth keeping.