The Cross

Lenten Vespers, Week Four

Matthew 16

²⁴Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ²⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. ²⁶For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? ²⁷“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. ²⁸Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We all have our crosses to bear. Isn’t that right? “If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Me.” The Cross is the surest and final Mark of the Church, for indeed where there is the Cross, there is Jesus, and where there is Jesus, there is the Church.

Taking up the Cross, however, does not mean that we must seek out hardship. There remains the persistent thread of Christian heresy which insists that we must suffer in order to be forgiven, that we must be crucified to earn the Resurrection. But folks, we don’t have to earn anything from Jesus, if for no other reason than the simple fact that we can’t. We can in no way earn God’s forgiveness or mercy or new life in Christ. Not a chance. But thanks be to God, Christ—Who is God—has done it all, earned it all, for us, and given to us new life as pure and gracious gift.

In other words, Jesus bore the Cross that we could not bear ourselves. A Cross, mind you, that God did not inflict upon us but that we inflicted upon God. So what does it mean to say that we must bear the Cross? How is the Cross a Mark of the Church?

The lesson of the Cross is that God’s ways are not our ways. He does not behave as we would behave, were we God. Time and again, God inverts our expectations, choosing slaves over kings, shepherds over giants, younger siblings over family heirs. He champions the very young and very old, the poor and the forgotten, the wounded, the widowed, and wayward. He comes to us where we least expect to find Him and acts as we least expect Him to act. This is the Way of the Cross, the Way that flips the world upside-down. For truly, our whole world is upside-down, and only in the Cross do we see it aright.

When God promised the Messiah, we expected a warrior, an avenger, a great general leading heavenly armies of righteous destruction. Instead we got a rabbi, a carpenter, a wandering healer and ascetic. So of course we killed Him. Even then, having murdered our God in the most hideous and humiliating way that we in our tortured machinations could devise, we expected retribution, fire and brimstone. We killed Christ; surely now He would command the planet Mars, say, to come and knock the Earth out from beneath our feet.

But no. Instead of punishment, He pronounced our forgiveness—pronounced it even from the rough-hewn and bloodstained Cross. And He took the death that we handed Him, and transformed it into eternal life. He took the defeat that we offered Him, and made it His greatest triumph. He made those thorns His crown, that Cross His throne, that tomb His womb of new birth. He took every horrible, hateful thing that we could throw at Him and remade them into things good and beautiful and true, and He did it all for us and for our salvation. It was insane. It was impossible. It was absolutely perfect.

And having been crowned King of Kings and Lord of Lords in all of existence for all of eternity, how does Christ come to us today? In glory and honor and might? No. Still He comes to us through the Cross, through the world turned upside-down. He comes to us in the midst of our suffering and our hopelessness. He comes to us in word and water, bread and wine, the simplest things of everyday life. He comes to us in the midst of our sin and takes it all upon Himself, bearing our burdens, promising a future where we could discern naught but chaos and oblivion.

Jesus calls us to bear the Cross, not in that we must earn new life and love, but in that the Cross is where He still chooses to meet us, to heal us, to call us forth from darkness into light. In loving one another, in trusting that suffering will be healed, in knowing that death will never have the final say, we gather together beneath the Cross of Christ. And the world can see that. The world can see that our God does not act as humanity expects God to act, that through Him we see the world upside-down and thereby make sense of it all.

The Cross is not a ladder to be climbed only by the prideful, the powerful, and the pure. The Cross is the bridge by which our God descends, down into our doubts and despair, down into the mud and the blood, to love us back to life again. And this, brothers and sisters, is the surest sign of God’s presence. For where we find the Cross, we find Jesus. And where we find Jesus is the Church.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.