Mark 8 27-35 notes

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8:34 Taking Up the Cross?

As commonly applied, this is not a very hard saying. As originally intended, it is very hard indeed; no saying could be harder.

As commonly applied, the expression is used of some bodily disability, some unwelcome experience, some uncongenial companion or relative that one is stuck with: “This is the cross I have to bear,” people say. It can be used in this watered-down way because its literal sense is remote from our experience. In the West capital punishment is now rare or a thing of the past, and it is difficult even to paraphrase the saying in terms of ordinary experience.

There was a time when capital punishment was carried out publicly. The condemned criminal was led through the streets on foot or dragged on a cart to the place of execution, and the crowds who watched this grim procession knew what lay at the end of the road. A person on their way to public execution was compelled to abandon all earthly hopes and ambitions. At that time these words of Jesus might have been rendered thus: “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him be prepared to be led out to public execution, following my example.”

In all three Synoptic Gospels these words follow the account of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus’ first warning about his impending passion, Peter’s expostulation and the rebuke which it drew forth from Jesus. It is as though he said to them, “You still confess me to be the Messiah? You still wish to follow me? If so, you should realize quite clearly where I am going and understand that by following me you will be going there too.” The Son of Man must suffer; were they prepared to suffer with him? The Son of Man faced the prospect of violent death; were they prepared to face it too? What if that violent death proved to be death on a cross? Were they prepared for that?

The sight of a man being taken to the place of public crucifixion was not unfamiliar in the Roman world of that day. Such a man was commonly made to carry the crossbeam, the patibulum, of his cross as he went to his death. That is the picture which Jesus’ words would conjure up in the minds of his hearers. If they were not prepared for that outcome to their discipleship, let them change their minds while there was time—but let them first weigh the options in the balances of the kingdom of God: “for whoever wants to save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it” (Mk 8:35).

Many, perhaps most, of those who heard these words proved their truth. Not all of them were actually crucified. This, we know, was Peter’s lot; the first of those present to suffer death for Jesus’ sake, James the son of Zebedee, was beheaded (Acts 12:2). But this is what is meant by “taking up the cross”—facing persecution and death for Jesus’ sake.

When Luke reproduces this saying he amplifies it slightly: “he must deny himself and take up his cross daily” (Lk 9:23). A later disciple of Jesus, one who was not present to hear these words in person, entered fully into their meaning and emphasizes this aspect: “I die every day,” Paul writes (1 Cor 15:31), meaning “I am exposed to the risk of death every day, and that for Jesus’ sake.” He says that he and his fellow apostles “always carry around in our body the death of Jesus” and explains himself by saying that “we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor 4:10–11). In another place he refers to “the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” for whose sake he has suffered the loss of everything, and tells how his consuming ambition is “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Phil 3:8, 10). As a Roman citizen, Paul was not liable to be crucified, but he knew by experience what it meant to “take up his cross daily” and follow Jesus.

Jesus’ words about the necessity of denying oneself if one wishes to be his disciple are to be understood in the same sense. Here too is a phrase that has become unconscionably weakened in pious phraseology. Denying oneself is not a matter of giving up something, whether for Lent or for the whole of life; it is a decisive saying no to oneself, to one’s hopes and plans and ambitions, to one’s likes and dislikes, to one’s nearest and dearest, for the sake of Christ. It was so for the first disciples, and it is so for many disciples today. But if this is how it is to be taken—and this is how it was meant to be taken—it is a hard saying indeed.

Yet to some disciples it might be encouraging at the same time—to those actually being compelled to suffer for their Christian faith. The Gospel of Mark was probably written in the first instance for Christians in Rome who were enduring unforeseen and savage persecution under the Emperor Nero in the aftermath of the great fire of a.d. 64. For some of them this persecution involved literal crucifixion. It was reassuring for them to be reminded that their Lord himself had said that this kind of experience was only to be expected by his disciples. If they were suffering for his name’s sake, this meant that they were sharers in his suffering; it meant also that they were truly his disciples and would be acknowledged as such by him in the presence of God.

See also comment on luke 14:26.

[1]

Dying to Death, or Crucified with Christ

The third point of the theology of the cross focuses on what God did on the cross (1 Cor. 2:2). There he atoned for sin and swallowed death. There, in his own impotence and foolishness, he succeeded at the task of setting aside all that keeps us from him. There he succeeded at re-creating us in his own image. Luther called what happened on the cross “the joyous exchange.” Life is restored to sinful human creatures, dead in trespasses and sins, only because God has exchanged our sinfulness for Christ’s righteousness. We live only because Christ died with our sins on his back and buried them in his own tomb, the only place in the universe where our Heavenly Father no longer looks. We live because Christ shares with us the life he had the power to reclaim in his own resurrection.

In him, wrong is made right, and death is left behind for life, through God’s peculiar way of doing things. The theology of the cross presupposes that the cross, death, is the path to life. The final result of this joyous exchange is that we who were buried and raised with Christ in Baptism (Rom. 6:3–11; Col. 2:11–15) are joint heirs with him, even as we suffer with him, and will share glory with him (Rom. 8:17).

Thus, the theology of the cross spells out the death of all human pretension to merit, to winning life by human effort. It announces the death of human control over human destiny. This theology announces the death of sinners to sin and their resurrection to new life in Christ. It announces the death of death itself. This announcement liberates human creatures from the threat of death and thus bestows upon them genuine human freedom. Once sinners have seen the cross, there can be no more wallowing in guilt. Freedom is bestowed on us through God’s own death, as the second person of the Trinity came to the cross, to save sinners, to restore their humanity.

Discipleship under the Cross

Fourth, the theology of the cross presupposes that the life of the believer, the life of discipleship—learning from and following after Christ—is a life under the cross (Matt. 16:24–26). Believers have their own crosses to “take up.” Our crosses, however, do not save ourselves or save others. Instead, they convey the love of Christ to others in a sinful world of suffering. As we take up our crosses and follow our Lord (Matt. 16:24), we are living out life as it must be lived if the good and gracious will of our loving Heavenly Father is to triumph over evil. Only in this fashion has he succeeded in overcoming evil. Neither blessing nor cross determines whether we are in God’s favor. Only his Word determines that—as it comes to us in Baptism and absolution, in preaching and the Lord’s Supper, in our conversation with one another as fellow believers. We should not be surprised when our faith leads us into suffering for the sake of the neighbor. That is often the means the God of the cross uses to battle evil.

Life under the cross crucifies the habits of hell. The strong pruning hook of the Law combines with the believers’ confidence in Christ’s deadly death, and these believers find they have no need to use their hellish habits to defend themselves. Life under the cross gives rise to the habits of heaven. Faith perceives how God succeeds, in his own self-sacrifice and self-surrender, in his submission to human needs, his suffering, and his willing service.

[2]

 


 
 
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1. William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), pp. 191-205.
2. Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Nelson Saba, Dr. James Strange, iLumina Gold software (Tyndale House Publishers, 2003). 
3. Jan Goldstein, Life Can Be This Good (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 2002), pp. 139-142.
4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1961),  pp. 45-47.
5. Alison Leslie Gold, Fiet's Vase (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2003), pp. 137-148.


* His full name is Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches. Use it if you choose, but it is a mouthful for the pulpit. 


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[1]Kaiser, W. C. (1997, c1996). Hard sayings of the Bible (427). Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity.

[2]Kolb, R. (2000, c1993). The Christian faith : A Lutheran exposition (electronic ed.) (26). St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House.

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