If anyone wants to follow me: Reject yourself.
Pick up your cross daily. Follow me. —Jesus, Luke 9.23 KWL
I don’t believe most Christians realize how radical a command this is. Probably because they don’t realize it is a command. Most bibles render it, “Let him reject himself; let him pick up his cross daily; let him follow me,” as if we’re to permit people to follow Jesus, and not get in their way. But these are imperative verbs; they’re orders. If you want to follow Jesus, you must do these things.
And the converse is true: If you don’t care about following Jesus, you won’t do these things. As many so-called Christians don’t. They don’t reject themselves; they use Christianity to affirm themselves. The only crosses they pick up are jewelry. They don’t follow Jesus either; they expect him to follow them, and be with them wherever they go, even as they go the wrong way. They figure that footprints-in-the-sand poem sums it up quite nicely: Jesus is always there, and even carrying us through the rough parts.
Now yes, Jesus (’cause he’s God) is always there, but we must never confuse his presence for his endorsement. He’s listening for the prayers of repentant pagans; how much more will he hear the prayers of repentant Christians? But if we’re not following him, not rejecting ourselves and our little comforts, not taking up our crosses, and not worried about it ’cause we figure his grace covers all… well, we might be taking too much for granted.
Crosses in Jesus’s day.
In our day, crosses are one of Christianity’s logos. They’re inspirational. They’re art and jewelry. They’re reminders of Jesus’s love and forgiveness and self-sacrifice.
In Jesus’s day, they were a reminder that Israel was under the thumb of the Roman Empire, and that without a trial, without warning, Roman soldiers could haul you away from your family, strip you naked, nail your wrists and ankles to a post in such a way that you’d have to pull on those nails in order to breathe, and leave you for dead. Which you would be, by Friday night: The one concession they made for their Jewish subjects was they’d break your legs so you could properly suffocate to death before Sabbath. Crosses, you see, were nasty. Not inspirational.
Taking up your cross was a reminder of how the Romans, as they led you away to be crucified, would make you carry your own cross. Not necessarily the whole cross, as Christian art depicts it. Often the post would stay in the ground, and you’d carry the crossbeam, and the Romans would attach them at the crucifixion site. Carrying your cross was a metaphor, like “digging your own grave” or “hoist by your own petard,” where you would be the instrument of your own destruction. It was an extreme example of rejecting yourself: Jesus didn’t just expect his followers to casually give up our lives, figuring, “I’m gonna follow Jesus, and if it kills me, oh well.” We’re to expect it to kill us. We’re to be surprised if it doesn’t—if, by some fluke, we die rich and comfortable, having never experienced a day of hardship for the sake of Jesus. (Yet to hear some American Christians talk, they act as if a hardship-free Christianity is their birthright.)
Jesus didn’t promise us success and victory and triumph and greatness in this life. He promised us the Kingdom. In this life, we suffer. In the next, we inherit the world. In this life, expect to be mocked, persecuted, and slandered. And if we’re not, we’re either too well sheltered, or not doing a bloody thing.
Hang on to your soul, and you’ll ruin it.
This verse is part of a larger teaching Jesus made. You can, of course, memorize the whole of it.
The Son of Man must suffer greatly,
getting rejected by the elders, head priests, and scribes,
getting killed…
and getting raised on the third day.
So he told everyone,
If anyone wants to follow me: Reject yourself.
Pick up your cross daily. Follow me.
For anyone who wants to save their soul will destroy it;
the one who destroys their soul on account of me will save it.
What does a person achieve by gaining the whole universe,
yet destroying or forfeiting themselves?
When anyone’s embarrassed of me and my teachings,
the Son of Man will be embarrassed by this person once he returns
in the glory of himself, the Father, and the holy angels.
Truthfully, I tell you:
Some of these people standing here won’t taste death
before they experience God’s Kingdom. —Jesus, Luke 9.22-27 KWL
The minor slings and arrows we suffer as a result of how others esteem Christians, is nothing compared to the outright persecution and death threats Jesus’s followers suffered in the first century. And yet these minor inconveniences are enough to get Christians to shut up about their faith, to hide it lest we get hassled for it, to become stealth Christians whose light is hidden under a basket. If Jesus is embarrassed by people who won’t die for him, how much more embarrassed is he by people who deny him over convenience? I’m not even talking about radical Christianity. Jesus is. I’m talking about simply admitting our relationship with Jesus. The Spirit can convict you about how far you ought to take that relationship. But Jesus’s words indicate it involves a radical denial of self. Are we willing to be that radical?
Other versions.
Meditate on Christ’s words. Here they are in a few other versions.
Original. Élegen de pros pántas:
King James. And he said to them all,
New Living Translation. Then he said to the crowd,
New Revised Standard. Then he said to the crowd,
English Standard. And he said to all,