Taking Up Our Cross

Mark 8:31-38

This is one heck of scripture passage, weighty and complicated; I’m going to unpack it using some pretty weighty and complicated scholarship. But first, let’s talk about Mr. Rogers.

Last Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the first airing of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I heard a re-broadcast of an interview with Fred Rogers in which he talked about the road to becoming children’s television neighbor. He studied music at college and was all lined up to go to seminary when he felt a tug in a different direction, to work in broadcasting. He was struck with how violent and stupid most of the programs passing for “children’s entertainment” were, consisting largely of slap-stick humor and people getting hit in the face with pies. Rogers felt a deep passion for raising creative and imaginative children who could engage the world with more than just violence and stupidity. “I'm convinced that when we help our children find healthy ways of dealing with their feelings—ways that don't hurt them or anyone else—we're helping to make our world a safer, better place.”[1] And so he and another intern began, on their own dime and in their own free time, to produce a televised puppet show to teach children how to trust their feelings, how to manage them in healthy ways, and to teach children the importance of dreaming and hoping, and how make-believing helps us develop the ability to discern the way forward to a brighter and better tomorrow. The rest is history, as they say.

We started off our Lenten Journey talking about the very human tendency to get stuck in the tricks and traps of sin and God’s desire to free us—“to lead us from temptation and deliver us from evil” as it were. Last week we struggled with how difficult it can be to find the way forward from sin and brokenness, but affirmed that God calls us to it and walks the way with us, going ahead of us to lead, and behind us to encourage. In today’s text, Jesus seems to affirm God’s desire to un-stick us from the Satanic spirituality of sin and evil—to teach us to engage the world with more than just violence and stupidity—while simultaneously complicating the way forward: “If any wants to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” I’ve heard of people giving up stuff for Lent, but giving up myself? What’s that all about?

To help answer these questions, I’m relying heavily on the wisdom of Lamar Williamson, Jr (professor emeritus from Union Presbyterian Seminary, and author of a commentary on the book of Mark), and Walter Wink (modern theologian, and author of Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination). Williamson asserts that “the call is not to deny oneself something, but to deny self,” but then in the same breath clarifies “nor is the call to reject oneself.”[2] “Self-hatred is not the way of Jesus.” This reminds me so much of the way Mr. Rogers used to engage me as a child, and tell me, “You are special, and I like you just the way you are.” I am convinced God feels the same way, and yet Jesus asks us to “deny ourselves.” I’m still a little unclear with what he means by this, and how “taking up our cross” fits into the big picture of God’s love for us.

Walter Wink echoes Williamson’s assertion, “Jesus does not ask for mere self-denial; the word here, aparneomai, is the intensive of “to deny” (arneomai), and means ‘to deny utterly; to disown.’ It’s not a question of denying certain things to oneself, like ice cream during Lent, but of disowning the ego’s claim to possess this life.”[3] “Those who want to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” I made the claim last week that our faith teaches us “we cannot save ourselves.” Williamson would add that neither can we possess our own life.[4] Jesus is talking about falling into the trap set by our egos to believe that we can do it all on our own, that we don’t need God.

This is where I find Walter Wink’s work to be fascinating. He seems to understand the human ego to be that part of ourselves that can become stuck in this world, and stuck in worldly expectations, and power struggles. He refers to all of this as the “Domination System,” because that is the aim of the worldly powers under the influence of sin, to dominate and assert power, to possess our lives. The heart of the Gospel message to those of us striving to live in the midst of the Domination System is this: you do not possess your own life, but neither does this world possess it. And throughout the New Testament scriptures we see the language of dying and rising used to describe the process of our lives being freed from worldly powers and reclaimed by the purposes of God.

“Why does the New Testament use this imagery of death for the process of fighting free from the Powers? Because, says Jung [20th century psychologist], the unconscious still operates on the archaic law that a psychic state cannot be changed without first being annihilated. And the annihilation must be total; ‘the gift must be given as if it were being destroyed.’ This is what was symbolized by…the burnt offering in Israelite sacrifice: the entire victim was consumed by fire so that no benefit might be had of the remains. In the sacrificial system the need to sacrifice the ego was projected upon the animal. When the projection is withdrawn, one faces the task of dying to the socially formed ego in order to become the self one is meant to be.”[5]

Wink is essentially saying that Jesus’ insistence that his followers “deny themselves” is referring to this process of dissociation from an ego which has been possessed by the Domination System, and totally reorienting our egos with God at the center. “What is required,” says Wink, “is the crucifixion of the ego, wherein it dies to the illusion that is the center of the psyche and the world, and is confronted by the greater self and the universe of God.”[6]

God’s purposes are lost to those who are blinded by the spirituality of the Domination System, which has its own set of myths and stories. The central myth of domination is the myth of redemptive violence, which claims that violence is a means of suppressing chaos and restoring order. This is the myth behind the spirituality which has possessed a culture and society in which heartbreak, anguish, anger, confusion, and disagreement are often the impetus for violence. The myth of redemptive violence informs the spirituality of a nation in which troubled youth and adults seek to reorder the chaos of their life with a gun, whether aimed at themselves or others. This is the myth against which our God speaks out…literally, asserting that it is not violence which is redemptive, but the word of God, the same word that created all things also calls all things to order. In this call is the way forward. And the Word of God made flesh calls us to deny ourselves and to take up our cross and to follow. To die and to rise with him.

“This process of dying and rising is menacing to those caught in the myth of redemptive violence because it means facing the evil in themselves, and they see that as equivalent to damnation. For in that myth, salvation consists in identifying oneself as good by virtue of belonging to the right side. Psychologically, this means defining oneself as good in order to achieve a sense of well-being. The intolerable pressure of one’s own inner shadow (unacknowledged hatred, anger, violence, lust, greed) can be released then only through projection onto others, against whom it can be exploded in a self-righteous fury. The myth of redemptive violence is mortally threatened by even the smallest amounts of self-knowledge.”[7]

Explosive self-righteous fury. Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like our nation’s response to every single school shooting? We struggle to understand the death-dealing spirituality of our nation all the while trying to deny our own complicity in it. We must confess and be forgiven. We must deny ourselves, deny our egos, deny our sense that we belong to ourselves alone, and take up our cross. We must die to the powers of sin and be reborn by the power of God. “Rebirth is coming home to the universe, the discovery of beauty and of delight in creation, the recovery of the capacity to love. It is the joy of belonging, of being a child of the Eternal. It is entry into the values of the society of partnership that is coming.” It is standing before God, unashamed, with ears unclogged to hear the voice that has been calling us our entire lives, “You are special, and I like you just the way you are…not the way the world wants you to be, but the way I made you.”

Take up your cross and die to this world, die to its expectations and values, die to its intimidation and powers, and be reborn into life eternal, life held in the steadfast love of God, which endures forever. The way forward involves a taking up our cross. If that scares you, then I invite you to listen to these words from Mr. Rogers, “It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.” That, O church, is your calling. Amen.

[1] The World According to Mister Rogers

[2] Williamson, Lamar, Jr. “Mark” from Interpretation. 154

[3] Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers. 161

[4] Williamson. 154

[5] Wink. 158

[6] Ibid. 159

[7] Ibid. 161