Bearing the Cross

S. Mark viii. 34–38

The connection of Christ’s glory with His abasement, which was brought out so strikingly when the confession of His Godhead was followed by the prediction of His Passion, has been very beautifully illustrated in the picture of a great Christian artist. The scene is the Carpenter’s shop at Nazareth; the toil of the day is over, the door is open towards the west, when the wearied Son of Man stretches out His arms for a momentary relief. The sun is just setting, and throws His shadow upon the wall — the shadow of a cross. At that instant His Blessed Mother, who is kneeling at a casket containing the gifts of the Wise Men, takes in her hand the crown which they had presented to Him as King, and which she fondly hoped to see Him wear; she lifts up her eyes, and they light upon the dark shadow cast upon the wall.

Now there can hardly be a doubt that in her heart the future of her Son was thus overclouded. It had been so clearly predicted to her when she took the Babe into the Temple, that the anticipation of the predestined sword must have pierced her soul again and again. But probably the disciples were troubled by no such forebodings till the unreserved declaration of what awaited Him in Jerusalem gave a rude shock to their hopes. The severe rebuke to S. Peter for doubting the certainty of His prediction must have satisfied them that there was no escape. They had then to face the fact that their cherished aspirations, their hopes that all obstacles would soon be overcome, and that they would sit on thrones in His kingdom, were dashed by this new revelation. There was, it is true, an element of consolation in His utterance, but the bare thought that their Master must suffer and die took such complete hold of them that they gave it no consideration.

And then He had a still further disclosure to make. Not only must He suffer Himself, but a similar fate was in store for them; and not for them only, but for all who wished to become members of His Church. Self-sacrifice in place of self-pleasing was to be the watchword of His disciples, and, as though to impress upon them that it was a law of universal application, He called the people within the sound of His voice before He proclaimed it. “Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”

It was not altogether a new doctrine. Philosophers had taught men that righteousness is naturally persecuted in a sinful world. Plato had come very near to our Lord when he said that “the righteous man will be scourged, tortured, and bound, will have his eyes burned out, and at last, after suffering every kind of ill, will be impaled or crucified.”

But Jesus advanced a step further when He declared that a man must take up the cross himself. There could be no mistake as to what it implied in its literal meaning. Crucifixion was not a Jewish punishment, but since the Romans had been in possession of Palestine 2 the people had become familiarised with it, and must have seen many a condemned criminal bearing the instrument of his death to the place of execution. In His prevision of the early years of Christianity, our Lord knew that such a death awaited some of those to whom He was speaking. But the broad principle involved in His declaration is that sacrifice is inseparable from the Christian calling.

There is, we know, a wonderful spell in the cry, “Come after me,” “Follow me.” All history, profane as well as sacred, has shown us this. The great Roman general realised its force when he called to his soldiers, who shrank from the hardships of the Libyan desert, and promised to go before them and to command them nothing which he would not first do himself. Even so Christ designed to help His followers by the assurance that He should first suffer that which they would be called to bear.

In the first of the three arguments brought forward to enforce the principle, some obscurity is caused from the want of one English equivalent for the Greek word translated “life.” On His lips it had a double significance — viz., that which we now live in the flesh, and that which we live in union with the life-giving Spirit, — a lower and earthly life, and a higher and heavenly. If, He argues, any man thinks only of the former, and makes everything bend to that, with all its temporal enjoyments and self-pleasing, he will forfeit all right to the latter. If, however, he learns to sit loosely to that, and is prepared to resign it whenever a strong sense of duty prompts the resignation, he carries in his hand a passport into a higher and nobler existence. “Whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”

That is the first inducement, and the second is not unlike it. It rests upon the vast disproportion between the two lives.

He pictures to His hearers a man placed upon trial for his conduct, and condemned to forfeit 1 all claim to eternal life, because he has thought only of the present, and taken his fill of its pleasures; and then He weighs in the balance one against the other, what he has gained and what he has lost, and the former flies up at once and kicks the beam, for it is “altogether lighter than vanity itself.” The same truth is enforced under another figure. There are many things which may be recovered by ransom or won back by exchange, but eternal life, once forfeited, is past recovery; at least no corruptible things, such as silver and gold, neither “thousands of rams nor ten thousands of rivers of oil,” can effect a redemption or offer the least compensation, for “it costs more to redeem their souls, so that he must let that alone for ever.”

His last argument is an appeal to the recompence and requital at the Final Judgment. S. Mark records His reference to the latter alone. It is a call to those who heard Him to break with the spirit of that sinful and adulterous generation, branded with unfaithfulness to their rightful Lord, and not to be ashamed to confess Him openly; for if every man is to be rewarded according to his works, then to be ashamed of Christ before men entailed the fearful requital of being put to shame by Him in the presence of the angels.

It was all perhaps a gloomy outlook, but it was broken by gleams of bright anticipation if only they would have seen them. True, He was destined to die; suffering, humiliation, and shame awaited Him; but this was not the end, for He spoke also of the resurrection and of His return “in the glory of His Father.”

And yet once more He promised that some of them would live to see in this life a foretaste of the glory that should follow. Yet forty years and Jerusalem would be destroyed. All the present opposition would be crushed, and men should see in the judgment about to fall upon the Jews a type and assurance of that which would be consummated at the end of the world; and not only so, but it would be followed by the establishment of His visible and spiritual kingdom upon earth. The Church was destined to rise out of the ashes of the Temple. Their eyes were to be delighted with a yet nearer vision and manifestation of Divine glory, so soon to be vouchsafed to the inner circle of the Twelve, and it could hardly have been absent from His thoughts while He spake; but the intimation that all would not survive to witness the coming of His kingdom with power is the clearest proof that He looked beyond the Transfiguration.

Note: Holman Hunt.

Note: avacrx’-v5vlev(iy, not elsewhere used, is regarded by lexicographers as equivalent to dyaaKoXowieiu and avacrravpovv. Cf. Herod, ix. 78.

Note: Syria was made a Roman province after the conquest of Pompey, B.C. 64, and Judaea was united with it A.D. 6.

Note: fy/xiou is a forensic term, to mulct, to amerce, to fine. The Authorised Version, by rendering it here “lose,” and in the parallel passage in S. Luke, “be cast away,” has missed all that the word implies.