WHOSE & WHAT KIND of Cross?

I’ve been thinking a lot about paths we take in life, and how, when we don’t stay focused, we get confused, distracted or lost along the way.

The paths we take in life do very much matter. This is especially true when we go through big transition times in our lives. After a job ends, a child leaves home, or a spouse dies, we of course have to adjust to a whole new reality. Even as very GOOD changes come about: graduating, having a child, entering into retirement; in each instance, we remain for a while in an uncomfortable place and time of adjustment. “We’re (tempted to) think that making transitions in our lives is a two-step process,” says Tony Robinson. “There’s the old thing, and then, there’s the new. One reality ends, another begins. Actually, making transitions is always a three-step process. Step one- endings. Step two- adjustment. Step three- new beginnings. Because when former attachments, long-established patterns, relationships even, come to an end, we enter a kind of no-man’s land. We're traveling the territory of the "muddled middle" then, a via regativa, a betwixt and between time. We may not like that in betwixt time, but it’s necessary and impossible to rush. We have to be strong to adequately tolerate it. But it does us good when we accept, even honor such in between times. However uncomfortable, they tend to be times that motivation, innovation and revitalization best and most frequently simmer.

Symbolically, Lent is just such an honorable in-between time; a temporary do-without, neither fish nor fowl time, a necessary, often-uncomfortable, slow-simmering transitional time.

The season of Lent is a time tailor-made for facing new challenges. It was tough for the disciples to stay right there with Jesus as HE began to transition, as he began to turn his face toward Jerusalem, to non-violently confront head-on the threatened principalities and powers, those persons in positions of authority who were hell-bent on persecuting him and preventing his New Kingdom (or Commonwealth) from gaining adherence.

“Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man (or you can say ‘The Human One’) must undergo great suffering”. But what KIND of suffering is he talking about? He’s NOT referring here to the kinds of suffering ALL people to varying degrees endure in life, such as illness and the ravages of aging. In this wider context of a hurting humanity, Jesus was ONLY and ALWAYS about ALLEVIATING suffering! Most of the stories about Jesus up to this point in the gospel were HEALING stories! AlleviAtion of suffering, NOT, and in NO SENSE, any kind or degree of honoring, celebrating, or promoting suffering for its own sake. Jesus was not a masochist. He didn't mean to promote suffering or victimization of any kind; just the opposite. And yet: he knew that a particular KIND of suffering, that of persecution, would be coming his way, and coming too for his disciples, coming as a bi-product of keeping their focus on the godly, not the god-awful way.

So: given that no one, not even Jesus, WANTS to be persecuted: “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” Wouldn’t YOU do the same thing if your friend told you he was going to get brutally persecuted and killed? Wouldn’t that seem, at first hearing, just a wee bit awful? Wouldn’t you want, if you could, do anything BUT? “Then turning and seeing that his disciples were wavering, wondering what to believe, Jesus also rebuked Peter, saying, “Peter, get out of the way! Satan, get lost! You are setting your mind not on divine things but on all-too human things.”

Last Sunday I shared Dorothy L’s childhood horseback-riding story, of how her horse suddenly tried to take a quick short cut straight up the hillside, and she fell off. We’re all tempted to try to take shortcuts in the way we go as Christ’s disciples. But these shortcuts don’t work. We fall off our horse. We don’t get to the place we wanted to go.

So calling the crowd with his disciples, he said, “If any want to become my followers, then LET GO of your old ways, your old selves, and take up your own crosses.” Step 2- transition adjustment time- carry crosses. Notice please whose cross he instructs us to carry. Not somebody else’s, not even his, but OUR OWN. We live in a world in which all kinds of people carry, and even get hung up upon the wrong kinds of crosses. Oppressed people think they are to carry the cross of their oppressors. Battered women think they’re to carry the cross of their abusers. Jesus was never a promoter of carrying such crosses, and certainly not of being hung upon any such! He opposed all kinds of victimization! But since his means were consistent with the end he envisioned, he knew there would be consequences, side effects, reactionary backlashes by the threatened status quo. THAT kind of suffering, he showed us how to endure. Which in turn made it easier for us to get through transitions, grief, loses of other and of all kinds. But we were originally being tutored in how to endure a particular kind of suffering, that of persecution, because THAT was the KIND Jesus knew would be a byproduct of going his truth-telling non-violent kingdom-building way. He didn’t LIKE the side affects, but he showed us how to endure them. He showed us how to get through Lent and past Good Friday, the ONLY real way to Easter- step 3- new beginnings.

“For those who want to save their old lives will lose them, but those who are willing to lose their lives for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will find them.” “Finding yet losing, losing yet finding: this was the central paradox at the heart of Jesus’ teaching and living. Hoard you life and you will find that it somehow escapes through your clutching fingers. Share your life and you will find a whole new dimension of happiness has been born inside you.

“Jesus saw clearly that there was a contest going on in each of us; a contest between a false self and an authentic self.” -Textweek

It was always a question of what KIND of self. It was never about an inflated individualized ego. But neither was it ever a question of eliminating a sense of selfhood in all entirely.

“The false self is an omelette of raw ego mixed up with many distortions, false goals, pride, fear, desperation, and a greedy exploitation of all things and people.

“The authentic self is the flickering light of a deep beauty within us, it is a little christ reaching upwards and outwards, wanting to share itself with others and with God who is the miracle at the heart of all experience.” -Textweek

We meet the true Christ along the way, trying to teach us that by losing life we find it.

"For what will it profit us to gain the whole world but lose our own best lives and truest selves?”

The wider context is that of discipleship, of ever and always leaving old ways behind and following in a new way of healing and forgiveness, of alleviation of all unnecessary suffering. Taken out of context, we get to thinking Jesus is saying that he (and we) should just accept whatever suffering that comes our way as God’s will. Nothing could be further from the truth. But the old ways of the world, of the principalities and powers, will be thrashing about, doing thier god-awful damage yet for a while. And we still have get past the difficult side effects of faithfulness. We don’t have to go it alone. The Lenten transition path, the via negaiva, the wilderness way, the way of the cross: it has been gone on long before us, and will be followed long after. Even we who are here now, because we ARE the Body of Christ here now, go the ancient via negativa together. It is the part of the path that is bathed in shadows. It’s the murkier, low-lying section of trail we have to get through or around. On it, we look squarely at what is real, even when what is real is a very difficult thing. And somewhere along the prayerful way, we befriend the darkness. We get willing and able to be present to things that have only gotten in the way before: pain, emptiness, and sadness. We exercise our spiritual muscle along this path, knowing by faith what is beyond it. Let us not be afraid to carry our own crosses through.