Sunday of The Cross, The Third Sunday of Great Lent
Mark 8:34-38; 9:1
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.”
Our task for Great Lent, as we learned from the Sunday gospel readings that lead up to it, is to repent, to change our ways in order to limit or abandon those things that control our lives and direct us away from concentrating on our life as Christians.
…those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Galatians 5:24)
Today, on the Sunday of the Cross, this is reiterated directly along with the goal of repentance contained a single verse from today’s gospel reading from Saint Mark: “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Taking up one’s cross—the carrying of or enduring one’s burdens in life—is not an end in itself. We don’t fast, we don’t fight passions simply to better ourselves, as a diet or other health regime would do. The Church places the cross before us now in the middle of Lent to instruct us that we endure these burdens so that we can follow Christ. And following Christ means the death of our own self-will, our own ego, so that we may surrender our will to God’s will. As we pray in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy will be done.”
Saint Paul reinforces this command of Jesus through his own testimony:
…I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)
This new life in Christ refers to the eternal life promised by Jesus, which is not meant to be awaited until after our physical death but is to begin now. This is shown by Jesus who experienced the pain of life in this fallen world through His vulnerability on the cross, yet He followed His Father’s will and was crucified by His adversaries and resurrected by His Father.
The cross is the ultimate act of weakness as Christ and the saints have shown us; it is the ultimate act of love; it is the ultimate act of humiliation and the ultimate act of glorification. The cross is the way to Christ’s resurrection and our own. Through the cross we enter into weakness, ask for God’s mercy and follow God’s will through acts of love, mercy, and compassion. Without the cross and death, we are still in charge of our lives and not living in the new and eternal life promised by Christ.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:5-11)
