Sunday, April 03, 2005

Christ on the Cross

Today was a special day in the life of the church.  Today we celebrated the cross.  It is an interesting time of the year to do this.  It is the third Sunday of Lent.  We have four weeks left until Pascha.  The text for today comes from Jesus’ discussions about following Him:

Third Sunday of Great Lent / Veneration of the Cross
Mark 8:34-9:1 (Gospel)

34 When He had called the people to Himself, with His disciples also, He said to them, “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
35 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.
36 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?
37 Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
38 For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man also will be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.
1 And He said to them, “Assuredly, I say to you that there are some standing here who will not taste death till they see the kingdom of God present with power.”

There are a number of things about this that strike me as “interesting” in some fashion.  However, I want to focus on two things from here:

34 ...Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
35 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.

There are a few things here that I am drawn to in the first passage…
“take up his cross”
“loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it”

I am drawn here due to historical context.

1) Christ has not gone to the cross (yet), thus they do not have that event as a perspective; However, the cross was used regularly at that time as a form of capital punishment.  It was, I would think, effective in several ways.
a.  it always worked - they made sure you were dead, there was never any sneaking off alive like many of the modern day movies and TV shows indicate are possible in today’s world;
b.  it was public - I suppose to entice others not to do that thing you did - or at least not to get caught - like the two thieves did;

I suppose one could make an argument that in following Christ you were intentionally going about to have yourself killed.  This is not the same a suicide, however it is very sobering once you understand the choice they were making.

2) What is this gospel he is referring to - it certainly wasn’t the New Testament as it had not been written yet.  I’ll need some help with this one..

Anyway, this is what I am contemplating this week.

--Moose