Good Friday 2020
“Take up your cross and follow me.” These words are at the very heart of the Gospel. They are there so that these same words might be at the very heart of our discipleship. Perhaps we have become so used to these words. Yet, they are some of the most confronting words we will ever hear: “Take up your cross and follow me.”
For the significance of the words to remain fresh we have to keep putting ourselves back into the time of Jesus and wonder at how the first disciples would have heard these words.
The cross was a familiar sight in first century Palestine. Crucifixion was the preferred method of the Romans of putting people to death. It was a shocking, brutal strategy implemented to keep people terrorized into submission. It was also something very public. The Romans would crucify people not out of sight but right outside the gates of the city, so that every time people came in and out of the city they had to endure the horror of seeing people dying on the crosses erected there. We can forget just how brutal the Romans were. And their brutality was increased by the way they would humiliate those they had conquered. They crucified people naked. For the Jewish people this was the ultimate humiliation. When people thought of crosses all they would be able to think about were two things: death and humiliation.
When Jesus begins to say then, “Take up your cross and follow me” the shock must have been palpable. “You are asking us to be humiliated and die?” It is little wonder that the apostle Peter would remonstrate with Jesus so forcibly when he himself first heard these words? He stands for each of us who recoils from the suggestion that we should suffer a humiliating death.
Why, then, is the cross at the very centre of Jesus’ understanding of life? Why, now, does the cross figure so prominently in our worship, in all our buildings, in our prayer? Why is this day centred entirely on it? Because it is the most shocking and confronting reminder that if we are to follow Jesus, then there is no alternative. If we follow Jesus we will be humiliated and we will die. This is the journey on which we will find ourselves by our discipleship of him.
It is an extraordinary proposition, when we think about it. It is firstly a journey of humiliation. What could Jesus mean by this? It is a journey in which we will be stripped of our pretence, of our masks, of our illusions. We will be laid bare; we will be rendered vulnerable. We will descend to a point at which we have no longer any defence, any guard, any protection. And in this process something is being put to death. What must die? As Pope Benedict put it one Lent, “the illusion of our self-sufficiency.” What must die is our self-enclosure, our self-preservation, our self-aggrandizement. We are being called into the death of the self’s centrality. And this is a journey as radical as the death of crucifixion. We are to enter into the crucifixion of ourselves. We cannot follow Jesus without entering that same journey of self-emptying. Something must be crucified.
And something is, even now, being crucified by the circumstance of the pandemic in which we are living. As Pope Francis indicated fortnight ago, it
“. . . exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our packaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly ‘save’ us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us . . . In this storm the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away.”[1]
In other words, the social response to the pandemic crucifies our certainties, the illusion of our control and of our power. It crucifies our freedom to arrange life as we would wish. “We have gone ahead at breakneck speed,” the pope observed, “feeling powerful and able to do anything. Greedy for profit, we let ourselves get caught up in things, and lured away by haste . . . we carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.”
But crucifixion in this sense is not about self-annihilation. Because we have to ask, “Well, why would we do this?” “Why would we commit ourselves to such a journey?” We go on such a journey only because of a possibility that it presents for us.
What is that possibility? It is the possibility of dying to forgetfulness and rising to new mindfulness and awareness. In our physical distancing from each other, it is the possibility of dying to the habit of taking life and our relationships simply for granted and rising to a new empathy with and for the others in our life. It is the possibility of dying to a religious practice sustained more by routine and rising to a deeper faith grounded in our hearts and choices, a purified faith.
And the outcome of all this is that we die to our self so that we might rise to each other. We die to selfishness so that we might we might be able to share life more fully, more widely. We live without defence so that we might be more open to receive the other. We live without pretence so that we might relate to others more truly. We live without illusions so that we might live more hospitably. We die to our self so that we might live with more receptivity to one another, and more participation with each other. This is the new community into which the Cross stands as the doorway.
For this reason, we die. And we rise. We take up our cross and follow him.
[1] Pope Francis, Homily at Extraordinary Moment of Prayer, Sagrato of St Peter’s Basilica (27 March 2020), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2020/documents/papa-francesco_20200327_omelia-epidemia.html
