The carrying of the cross

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 8: 23 – 9:1) contains some of Jesus’ most severe admonitions: to deny ourselves and take up our cross. He describes some of the factors in this process, warning also that unless His followers confess His name before others, He will not confess their names before the Father. The passage ends with one of His more mysterious prophecies, according to which some of His listeners would not die before they saw the coming of the Kingdom.

This is not the kind of Jesus that people like to hear about these days. People prefer the cuddly type of Jesus, the one who is all smiles and sweetness, the one who gazes benignly on all comers, stands them a drink perhaps, or behaves himself decently at parties. I'm reminded of an anecdote from the life of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor who as a newly published author was invited to a fancy dinner party where one of the other guests was lapsed Catholic Mary McCarthy. McCarthy, at one point, waxed lyrical about her Catholic past, saying to her smiling listeners:

I like the Eucharist; it's such a lovely symbol.

O'Connor, looking up from her soup, replied acidly in her Georgian drawl:

Well, I say if it's just a symbol, the hell with it.

Perhaps one has to be a prophet to speak like that.

But this challenge of denying oneself and picking up one’s cross to follow Jesus is a choice that lies between two apparent extremes which, like all extremes, are adjacent to each other. On the one side, the fallen human being can be counted on to be devoted to themselves, almost unconditionally. No self-denial here, unless it be for self-interested reasons. The whole movement towards self-realisation or self-authentification in our own day – you be you - is a perfect example of this. To me to live is Christ and to die is gain, says St Paul. He would not have said you-be-you but you-be-Christ.

Famously, Saint Augustine wrote:

Two loves have built two cities: the love of self unto the contempt of God has built the city of man, and the love of God unto the contempt of self has built the city of God.

 

The civilization of love that St John Paul II acclaimed was, whether we like it or not, pitched against a civilization devoted to self-interest and self-love.

The other extreme that I mentioned above is not the love of God, so much as a counterfeit of the love of God. As a person becomes more devout, they take on the garments of one of the wedding guests of the Lamb, and yet there remains in them – indeed, in all of us – a streak of self-orientation that is not ready to die. At one level, the Christian life involves ridding ourselves of the obvious misalignment of our lives with the path of Jesus. If we say the fifteen-decade Rosary, the Divine Mercy chaplet, but still get roaring drunk and beat out spouse on a Saturday night, we have not really gone beyond that first level. Go and sin no more, Jesus says to us.

Beyond this point, however, the story of the death of self is not over. The self can live on, dressed now in the garments of devotion and piety. The mind may focus on higher callings to perfection, and yet that perfection can be not a pursuit of our final goal but a pursuit again of self-realisation, just in a religious mode. The love of self is like a moral radiation, the very half-life of which may last a lifetime and need the purification of Purgatory to put an end to it. It is not eliminated overnight in this life, without some mighty miraculous intervention of God. In this sense, we may, like St John of the Cross, prefer to think not about the goal of perfection which opens the door to this kind of self-focused project, but rather to think about union. For union does not belong only to the higher mystics but, in some sense, to every soul in a state of grace where charity reigns in the heart, even imperfectly. St Therese of Lisieux towards the end of her life is far from perfect in her own eyes and surely not in God’s, but she lives in deepest union with Him, overwhelmed by His grace and exultant in His joy.

Here, I am reminded of the old saying that the first thing we want is the last thing we get. If we want to follow Christ, we must go by the path He forges for us. Jesus Himself says it: pick up your cross and follow me.  Not because we want the pain; rather, we want the pleasure of His company, the eternal joy of His heart. This is the pearl of great price for which we may need to sell everything we have. For the following of Christ alone makes sense of the apparent losses we must suffer. We do not want the pain; we want the goal that lies beyond the pain where we are freed from the misery of self-love or indeed from love of this world and transformed by the happiness God wants to share with us.

But what if the pain is the pain of others? In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More must face the prospect of going to his death, knowing that his wife does not understand why he put love of God ahead of love of the family. But in the end, even if Alice gives him something precious in this life, it is but a shadow of the love of God that unites us to the God of love.

Finally, the last paradox of this gospel, part of the death of self that we must undergo, is the realisation that picking up our cross is impossible to us. We cannot deny ourselves by our own power, no more than we can perfect ourselves by our own agency. All we can do is raise our eyes to heaven in supplication. And the One who gave us life in the beginning will bring us to the fulness of the life He wishes to give His children whom He rescues from the shipwreck of this world. All He wants is our “yes”.

And, if, like Mary, we can say “yes” to this cross and “yes” to this path, He will be pleased to say “yes” to our resurrection in His life where all our longings will be fulfilled in the bosom of the Father.