The Teacher speaks to us today about the cross: whoever wants to be saved must carry his cross and follow Me. Salvation is bound to this cross, and it is noteworthy that salvation is bound to man carrying his own cross. Jesus does not say, “carry My cross and follow Me.” So what is the meaning of the cross that Jesus wants us to carry?
The cross takes on a meaning distorted from its truth, so we understand it as what it is not; therefore we became unable to grasp its meaning, and it makes us rejoice in it as a beautiful symbol special to the Teacher, but we fear it when it concerns us. For the cross became bound in our popular concept to pain: when a calamity befalls a person, we say: “bear this, it is your cross”; when a person falls ill, we say: “this is a cross”; when a son or a family member dies, we say: “this is a cross.” The cross turned for us into a calamity, death and a problem, a predicament and a catastrophe that befalls the individual or the family. And if the cross is a calamity, how do we attain salvation through it?
The other matter lies in the saying: “Endure, this is a cross that God sent you,” while Jesus says: “Whoever wants to follow Me, let him carry his cross.” God does not send crosses to hang people on them or to make them suffer; carrying the cross is bound to our will and our free decision, and not to a fate imposed upon us from heaven. Popular thought has turned God, in our minds, into a tormentor who sends illnesses, death, and catastrophes under the name of the cross, whereas the message of the Gospel is a message of life, and God is the sender of light, not of torment. The pain resulting from illness and death is part of the nature of this corrupt world and the weakness and fragility of the human body, and it is never a divine cross.
So what is the cross?
The cross is the cause, or the message, or the mission that man chooses to carry in full freedom. When we say Jesus came to be crucified, we think that His goal is to suffer and die, so the cross becomes an end. When Jesus said that the Son of Man must be delivered up, the cross was not the goal; rather, it was the inevitable price of His message: the freedom and dignity of man, his liberation from bonds and injustice. The cross was the price of His fidelity to His message in the face of a world that rejects God. From here the meaning of carrying the cross becomes: fidelity to the message, even if it costs blood.
When Jesus says of Himself that the Son of Man came to be crucified, this becomes completely understandable when we recall our Eastern expression: “this man carries his blood on his palm.” Does this saying mean that this man’s goal is death? No; rather, it means that he is ready to complete his message even if it costs him his life. Like a man who goes to confront a corrupt authority, we say of him: he is going to his death, but in truth he does not want death; rather, the price of the confrontation he went to is death, or prison, or pain, and he is ready to complete it no matter what it costs. The pain Jesus suffered was the effect accompanying this confrontation; His cause was the freedom of man, and for the sake of this cause He paid its price with His life. =
“Whoever wants to follow Me, let him deny himself and carry his cross (his cause) and follow Me”.
The self-denial that Jesus means is not contempt for the self or the crushing of dignity; rather, it is liberation from the egoistic self. For the self that is required to be denied is interest, possession, the satisfaction of desires, exploitation, the striving for everything to be ours. What Jesus asks is that we liberate our true selves, our true life, our self without desires — that self that wants to live in its full dignity.
The man who sends his son to work to earn money at the expense of his son earns the money and loses his self as a father. The man who exploits his authority to oppress the weak loses his essence as a human being. The mother who profits her interest at the expense of her daughter loses her self as a mother. What does it profit a man to gain the money of the world and lose his self as a father, or as a man, or as a human being, or as a mother, or as a teacher, or as a physician?
When you chose to be a father, or a mother, or an official, or a professor, or a physician, or you chose to carry a greater cause — the defense of the wronged, striving for the dignity of man and his rights, lifting injustice from the oppressed, and defending the rights of women, equality, and justice in a society that may reject it or fight you for it — here you are carrying your cross, carrying your cause. The cross is that human cause to which you commit with awareness and freedom, and you bear the price of fidelity to it, just as Jesus did for the freedom of man. Thus Jesus’ saying becomes clear and radiant for us: whoever wants to follow Me, let him deny himself (his interest) and carry his message (his cross) and follow Me.
From here, man’s cause is to carry out his message, and with this understanding the cross is transformed from an instrument of death and torment into a fountain of life. This is the meaning of carrying the cross.