The Crux of the Gospel
Lent 2 Year B 2024; Mark 8:31-38
“The final control and measure and irritant in Christian speech remains the cross: the execution of Jesus of Nazareth.”1
Again this week the narrative structure of Mark’s Gospel gives way to the themes of Lent, as far as our order of reading goes. We leap forward to the very middle of the whole story, to the verses immediately before the Transfiguration episode that the Revised Common Lectionary gave us to read two Sundays ago.
With that story of strange anticipated glory goes this one of anticipated suffering; they interpret each other, although it may be hard work for the preacher to make that connection. Even now there is a lack of context in one crucial respect: the prediction of the passion (that we do read) follows Jesus question to the disciples (that we do not), “who do you say that I am,” and Peter’s famous confession of him as Christ. We do read Peter and Jesus rebuking each other today, but not the exchange about Jesus’ messiahship, which makes it (much) harder to understand that Jesus’ prediction is not just about coming events, but about the nature of the Gospel itself.
In any event, this is the half-way point of the narrative of Mark, the “good news of Jesus Christ,” but it is more than that; it is a hinge, a crossroads, a turning point—choose your metaphor, but the point is that things are changing from here. From the Galilean ministry Jesus now turns his face to Jerusalem, and this set of stories, including predictions of the passion and the Transfiguration, constitute that middle. Scholars have plotted the form of this center in varying ways, and it may even be understood to spread across a few chapters: there are three predictions of the passion in fairly close succession, the first here (then 9:30ff., and 10:32ff.), framed by two healings of blind men (8:22ff., 10:46ff.).
Yet this passage for Sunday has at least one strong claim on being the very center: it contains the first appearance in the Gospel of the word “cross.” The context is of course Jesus’ prediction of his own suffering, but the reference to a cross here is not to his own fate, but to the cost of discipleship for all.
Our familiarity with the term and especially with how it appears in the phrase “take up the cross” or similar is a challenge. We are used to the way this has come to mean something like a stoic approach to life for the Christian, the notion that bearing a cross is something to put up with or accept as a burden that can be justified because of some greater good. I mean no disrespect for those who have found the wisdom in accepting forms of unavoidable suffering if I say that this is not the point of the saying at all.
The cross is not a sign of burdensome suffering, a “thorn in the flesh,” but a specific reference to politically-driven violence and oppression. Crosses were the means by which the underclass, slaves not least and other outcasts including the subversive and treasonous, were executed. We have probably all heard this before, and perhaps applied it to the crucifixion itself and the experience of Jesus, but I suspect the implication that the cross defines a call to discipleship in general is less often considered.
It is true that crosses were implements of shame and degradation, and not merely means of death, and so the character of a cross and of carrying it is important beyond the straightforward implication of a willingness to die—as though that were not enough.
It is almost impossible to find an artistic depiction that shows what the saying of Jesus really refers to, and what he was later to undergo. Criminals routinely carried their crosses on the way to execution, but these were not the well-crafted objects of old master paintings or religious devotions. The “cross” carried by the condemned was almost certainly the cross-bar (patibulum) of the eventual scaffolding, the plank or log that would have the victim’s arms attached and then be hoisted onto an existing (and probably re-useable) vertical upright, the crux. This would have been gruesomely heavy, but not quite as bizarrely awkward as the usual renderings in art. The difference this makes to our mental pictures, or more importantly to our understandings of the saying, remains to be seen; but the point is of course that Jesus is not speaking of a religious symbol, or of an awkward burden, or just even of imminent death. He is speaking about the violence that oppressive forces use to control those who oppose them.
Two elements of the meaning of this cross that are more important in this Gospel than in our immediate or familiar interpretations are related. First, the process of carrying the beam was an expected part of the punishment and a public spectacle. The disciple is being warned, or invited, to a process where their allegiance to Jesus leads to shame and ridicule (not, or not only, to some sort of other or incidental suffering). Second, all of the consequences—shame, suffering, and death—are not the consequence merely of mortality or vulnerability, but of the real or perceived opposition between discipleship and the wider social and political order.
Jesus has from the beginning proclaimed not religious self-realization but the reign of God, a political order so different from the existing one that it is both completely opposed to the Empire, yet also incomprehensible to it, just as his messianic identity is so far incomprehensible to Peter and the others. They know he is the anointed king, but have no idea what this means, yet.
The difficult gift of secularization may be bringing this home to more Christians than in the past. Discipleship is increasingly odd, to put it simply. I note with caution how some conservative Christians have made the mistake of thinking their gradual loss of privilege constitutes a sort of persecution; this misreading does not however mean ignoring the force of change and the counter-cultural aspect of real discipleship.
It is important that the Church has been shrugging off its “Constantinian capivity,” the cosy relationship with state power characteristic of the medieval and earlier modern Church, of Christendom. It is less easy however to discern or to distance ourselves however from the succeeding bourgeois captivity of the present regime. Where capital and commerce reign (but clothe themselves with democratic trappings) the Church is tolerated as just another purveyor of goods and services, or as the chaplaincy service to the powers that be, harmless to the social order as long as we keep in our place. Yet what Jesus has proclaimed from the outset is not a service but a kingdom, a reign other than the one which purports to rule over him, and other than the ones which rule over us.
Whether or not that last sentence or two persuades you of the nature of our current malaise is less important than whether we can and should expect authentic discipleship to carry a cost, because it involves a different allegiance. The challenge and invitation of Jesus is not to suffer, but to place our faith in something— someone—whose program for human life and creation is the true origin and destiny of us all, whose message is of love alone and peace alone, and whom a world that serves acquisition and domination cannot comprehend, instead imposing the cross. Give us the cross then, Jesus says, and we shall see whose victory this truly is.
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (DLT, 1979), 1.