Week 3: Death

Take Up Your Cross

It must have been a morbid thought to his disciples. The cross was the ultimate symbol of Roman power and brutality. After defeating opposing forces, the Roman army would line the roads with crucified captives to symbolize their power. Anyone who walked down the roads would witness the rotting, decaying corpses of conquered losers on a cross. Jesus points to that cross, to that place of ultimate defeat and shame, as the way to follow him.

He wants them to do it daily… DAILY!?

He wants them to die every day to the ways of the world. The great theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his work The Cost of Discipleship, wrote it this way,

“The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is the dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to the death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.”