The Cross Is Daily

“And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” – Luke 9:23

“In Luke’s version of this saying of Christ the adverb daily is added. Every day the Christian is to die. Every day he renounces the sovereignty of his own will. Every day he renews his unconditional surrender to Jesus Christ.” – John Stott

I don’t know that I can really imagine what it was like for Jesus’ audience to hear him say this. Jesus had not been crucified yet. Back then, the cross was not the sentimental, religious symbol it is now. Crucifixion was the most painful and degrading form of capital punishment in the ancient world. There is no real modern parallel, not the electric chair, not the gallows or lethal syringe. The cross represented a protracted process, from scourging to bearing the crossbeam to nakedness to nailing to slow and public death, that was carefully calculated to maximize suffering and humiliation. What would Jesus’ listeners have thought? 

I read in one article, “the victim was forced to bear the crossbeam to the execution site in order to signify that life was already over and to break the will to live.” Yet Jesus is saying here that we must voluntarily do this, and even more shockingly, that this one-time event was to be a metaphor for our daily experience. Why does Jesus not say, “let him deny himself and be nailed to the cross”? He says, take up our cross. It is the part of the crucifixion process that is the most active. It is a step-by-step journey. It is a leaving of the city, a conscious yielding of the self, perhaps the most thoroughly public part of the process. Jesus says we must do this in a way that is personal to each one of us. To bear our cross each day is to walk every step in surrender, at any cost.

What would it look like if I lived my day with an expectation of surrender? Surrendering my self-centered impulses, my pride or how I look to others or even if they like me? Surrendering my plans, my comfort? That is what Jesus did for me. That is what following him means. This is the great paradox, that to find my life I must walk the road to lose it.