The Lord said: “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.”
Mark 8:34-38; 9:1
This week, we continue our season of remembering the Holy Cross of Christ with the Afterfeast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross. The forefeasts and afterfeasts of major feast days can be thought of as bookends to cycles in our liturgical year. These celebrations extend beyond the feast day itself, showing the value we place on all the days that mark our salvation playing out in real time. As Orthodox Christians, every celebration reminds us of God’s active gifts of salvation for all.
Last Sunday, we focused on the transformative power of the Cross through the descent of our Lord into His creation, so that by sharing our nature and taking on death, we may rise with Him in His ascent to the throne of our Father at the Second Coming of the Son of Man.
This week, we focus on the call to follow Christ by actively bearing our crosses as we journey toward the gift of transfiguration and resurrection in the dignity He offers to us all.
First, we must understand how the Cross was seen in Christ’s time: as an instrument of suffering, humiliation, and shameful death. Crucifixion was a brutal form of capital punishment employed by the Romans. The condemned could be forced to carry the crossbeam—the very instrument of their execution—to the place where they would be crucified. There, they would be affixed to the cross and left to suffer until death, which could result from a combination of trauma, blood loss, shock, dehydration, and respiratory and cardiovascular failure.
Before Christ, the cross was a grim fate. Yet through Christ offering His life upon the Cross, we see that the symbol of struggle and death now becomes the gateway to new life.
Still, the struggle of the Cross remains clear in the account of the Passion. Christ bears His Cross to Golgotha, not merely the beam, as He bears its full weight. Then He is nailed rather than tied to it. After He is nailed to the Cross, He hangs there until He willingly yields up His Spirit, having cried:
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
In that statement from the Cross, we see what God is doing through it.
In our struggles, Christ transforms our pain into hope. The Cross becomes a symbol of salvation, inspiring us to trust in God’s power to renew us through suffering, for He offers us new life by defeating sin and death.
For this reason, the Lord said:
“If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.”
Denying our false sense of self—our ego, pride, or personas and masks—opens the way for genuine spiritual growth and helps us follow Christ more closely, offering Him the parts of ourselves to which we cling that hinder our relationship with Him.
Denying our false sense of self requires us to take up the struggle set before us.
As I have examined my own life, I have seen that I have all too often taken on personas or masks to avoid struggle. For much of my teenage and young adult years, God forgive me, I changed how I presented myself to gain the approval of others.
The lie I told myself was that by holding onto false senses of self, I would not have to face the cross of struggling to know myself while understanding myself in relation to others—a cross I have since continuously struggled to bear.
Yet I have seen in my own life that shapeshifting to live according to a false sense of self only isolated me from others and, ultimately, from our Lord.
I once believed that changing myself for the approval of others would lead to acceptance. Yet in reality, it only drove me into an isolated tower of my own making.
I have found, however, that through the guidance of holy people, the passage of time, and prayer, self-denial leads to self-fulfillment in Christ, and this is a true path.
To follow Christ, we need to take on our struggle for what it is while remembering that He is there with us, bearing our burden.
True healing and salvation do not come from hiding from reality. Rather, God works within our reality, transforming what we offer Him, just as He transfigured the Cross.
Personally, this is the most challenging aspect of bearing my cross that I experience now: recognizing that Christ is there carrying it alongside me.
Thanks be to God that when the struggle seems too much for me, He gives me moments to see Him clearly and helps me carry on, even when my crosses—or the temptation to live according to a false self—seem too difficult.
I speak of myself because I am, first and foremost, still struggling to understand how God is calling me to live in this way, bearing my crosses, and because I believe there is no better way to convey how we bear our crosses than through our lived experiences with them.
We are called to deny our false sense of self, bear our cross, and follow Christ, remembering that He fulfills us all as He bears our burdens alongside us.
Our Lord shows us how He transforms our lives as He walks alongside us in our struggle when He states:
“For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it.”
When we try to live a life that is not centered in the fullness of life that Christ presents to us—for wealth, status, or any form of gain we find in this world—then we are, in all actuality, losing our lives.
This is a paradox.
We may think that if we hoard all of our wealth for a rainy day, then we will be spared when the day comes that we need it. Yet we cannot predict the loss of our wealth or, as with the man who built his storehouses, the loss of our lives.
Christ offers us true life, and when we center our lives upon Him, what may have seemed like loss becomes gain.
The Gospel—God’s message of love revealed through His acts of salvation—thus becomes our new means of life.
Our Lord then asks:
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life?”
Once again, we see a play on our perception of gain and loss.
We can fall into the temptation of believing that what is actually loss is true gain. Changing the version of myself that I presented to others felt like a way to avoid judgment or rejection, a veneer that preserved my life.
Yet when I had to face the isolation it created, I saw how dark a path the lie of false self-preservation leads us down.
We are called to follow the illuminated path of the Gospel, following after Christ while bearing our burdens.
There is enough struggle in bearing our crosses. We do not have to keep tripping in the darkness as the weight of our crosses crushes us. Instead, we are asked to let Christ and His saving acts illuminate our way.
Continuing, our Lord states:
“For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed, when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
Living a life that opposes the newness of life Christ offers leads us to oppose God and all that He offers.
If we are ashamed of God and all the gifts He offers us, and choose instead to live for the things of this sinful generation, then the Son of Man too will be ashamed of us when He comes in His glory.
Remember, as we stated last week, this title, Son of Man, speaks to how, in Christ, humanity has been raised into the presence of God through His sharing in our nature.
The Son of Man is transfiguring this adulterous and sinful generation. Yet if we live for the things of this age and are actively ashamed of the Son of Man, we will not be able to partake of all the gifts He offers us in the life to come.
Finally, our Lord tells us:
“Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God come with power.”
To make sense of this statement, we must remember the context of all that has come before.
Receiving the gift of new life that God offers us requires us to deny our false sense of self and bear the real burdens we carry as we follow Him.
When we live our lives for His sake and for the sake of the Gospel, then our lives are actively being saved. Thus, we see the acts of salvation offered to us presented in real time, not merely at some later date.
The body may fall to death and decay, yet we need to remember that we look to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
In the end, we will all stand fully in Christ’s presence. The proof is that we are already doing so in a veiled manner, as we see His grace strengthening and comforting us in our struggles.
So our Lord reminds us that each of us is being offered the fullness of new life in His loving and saving presence.
He has defeated death through His life-giving Cross, and in doing so, He shows us that through all of our struggles, we are also being presented with this newness of life.
Yet to receive new life, we need to let go of what is not truly us—all that hinders us from Christ—for in Him we receive all the fullness of life we need.
Let us take time to question the narratives we tell ourselves about where our value lies as persons.
Let us look at how what we value may be governing our lives, and as we call out to God in prayer, let us test all of these things in the light of His Gospel.
We cannot run from our crosses, but we can remember that Christ is with us, bearing them as He bore His own, and along the way, illuminating our path and transfiguring us through the struggle.
Our God will never abandon us, for He has offered the fullness of Himself to us upon the Cross so that we may have newness of life through bearing our own crosses and following Him.
What God is so great as our God! Truly, to Him be all glory, honor, and worship, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
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