"If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all"
Remember this saying : “God resists the proud but will always favor the humble” (Jas 4,6). Keep before you the Lord’s words: “Those who humble themselves will be exalted and those who exalt themselves will be humbled” (Mt 23,12)… If it seems to you that you have some good quality, set it to your account but without forgetting your faults; don’t boast about what you have done well today; don’t set aside recent and past evil. If the present gives you reason to glory, remember the past! That is how you will pierce the stupid abcess! And if you see your neighbour sinning, beware that you don’t just consider him in the light of this lapse but think, too, about what he is doing, or has done, that is good. Very often you will discover him to be better than you if you examine your life as a whole and don’t add up the fragmentary bits. For God doesn’t examine us in a fragmentary fashion… Let us often remember all this so as to preserve ourselves from pride, humbling ourselves so as to be raised up.
Let us imitate the Lord, who came down from heaven to the lowest depths… Yet after such a humbling he caused his glory to shine forth, glorifying with himself those who had been despised together with him. These were indeed, in fact, his first blessed disciples who, poor and naked, went out through all the world, without words of wisdom, without sumptuous escort, but alone and in anguish, vagabonds by land and by sea, beaten with rods, stoned, pursued and, in the end, put to death. Such as these are for us the divine teachings of our Father. Let us imitate them that we may also come to eternal glory, Christ’s perfect and authentic gift.
In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, Two crosses loom before our eyes: the cross of Christ and our own cross.
In the first part of the Gospel, Jesus speaks about His coming suffering and crucifixion. It seemed scandalous to Peter who, as most people in those days, saw suffering as only a curse and without redeeming value. But, we know the rest of the story. From Jesus’ Crucifixion came His Resurrection, redemption and renewal. Some of the most majestic Christian hymns over the centuries have been about the Crucifixion of Christ. Today, we raise the crucifix high in our churches because we see it as the place of Christ’s great victory over sin, death and human treachery. Some churches conclude the Stations of the Cross with a fifteenth station of the Resurrection so that we don’t divorce Christ’s death from His Resurrection. To do so can be spiritually lethal. Cross and Resurrection go together for the Christian disciple.
The challenge to us from today’s Gospel is not the cross of Christ as it was for Peter but the second cross about which Jesus speaks. That is the cross we carry in our own life. Everybody has a cross. Life without a cross is a fantasy. Our cross may be medical, financial, emotional, familial, work-related; it may be our neighbor, our spouse or our memories. We do not see the outcome of our cross as clearly as we see the outcome of Christ’s cross.
The particular cross we carry, however, opens our eyes to some critical truths.
The first is that the cross is what unites us. The poet Virgil has a line in his epic poem, “The Aeneid,” where the protagonist Aeneas sees images of war drawn on a wall. It brings back memories of what he had actually experienced. Virgil then states, (“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.” “There are tears at the heart of our world, and men’s hearts are moved by what people have to bear.”) Our individual crosses may differ but we all have a burden to bear. That is the common thread of our humanity. We all have a cross whether it is public or private.
The second insight for us from the cross is that the cross we carry is our distinctively individual and personal way of following the Lord. Jesus tells us to pick up our cross daily and to follow Him. It does little good to deny our cross, to resist it, to curse it, to refuse to deal with it. It is there as a fact of our life. All we can do is carry it. We can carry it grudgingly or as a disciple.
The third lesson of the cross for us is that the cross of Christ gives us hope. It is not hope that it will go away but that God will bring good from it in a way we can barely imagine. Through our cross, we will enter the world of deep discipleship; we will enter the path of faithful following of Jesus. It is the place where we will connect most deeply with the Lord.
When we boldly carry our cross, trusting in the Father’s love, that is when we can become most like Jesus. So, we have the tale of two crosses — Christ’s and our own. We know where the cross of Jesus leads. What about our own?
Fr. Krempa is pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Winchester.