Last week we talked about context and how our reading and understanding of Scripture is affected by our understanding of the people and the settings and the events of any set of Bible verses. This week I want to drill down just a little deeper because even if we understand the context, we may not always grasp the fact that words and images can have substantially different meanings and understandings today than they did to the people who heard and saw Jesus 2,000 years ago.
For example, our Gospel lesson concludes with Jesus talking about salt losing its saltiness and being no good. Those words really don’t make any sense at all to us. After all, salt is salt, and no matter what you do to it or how you use it, it always tastes like salt. The salt that we use today is pure salt, without any contaminants. It never loses its saltiness.
But 2,000 years ago, the salt that people used wasn’t purified. It probably included compounds of several different chemicals that were produced by the evaporation if sea water, and sometimes the sodium chloride – the true salt – could actually leach out of the compound to leave behind some worthless, tasteless or even bad-tasting minerals. The salt would lose its taste. As Jesus said, when that happened, it had no use. It was worthless.
Another example is how we think and react when we hear a phrase about bearing our own cross. In verse 27 of today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus says: “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” People have been jumping to conclusions about that statement for 2,000 years, and today there are a lot that still get it wrong. Simply because Jesus had already told His disciples that he was going to be killed, we all just assume that they knew that he was going to be crucified. But they didn’t.
Here’s what Jesus actually says about his death back in Luke 9:22: “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Did you notice that the word cross is missing from those words? Jesus foretells His death three times in Luke’s Gospel, and never once does he say that he will be crucified. He knows it, but he doesn’t say it, He doesn’t spell it out. The Greek word σταυρὸν which means “cross” only appears three times in the Gospel of Luke, and whenever Jesus uses that word He never ever associates the cross with His death. But on the two occasions when He does use the word cross, He’s talking about something very different: the cost of discipleship.
I did a Google search on the phrase “bear your own cross,” and one source defined it as “an unpleasant situation or responsibility that you must accept because you cannot change it.” A second definition reads like this: “If someone has a cross to bear, they have a heavy burden of responsibility or a problem that they alone must cope with.” Not exactly pleasant – but not the worst thing that could happen, either. And not necessarily a matter of life or death.
But 2,000 years ago, anyone who heard those words knew exactly what they meant: death. Not only a painful death, but a shameful, an embarrassing death. When someone was sentenced by the Romans to be crucified, that person would be forced to carry the heavy wooden cross bar through the city streets so that everyone would know what was going to happen and so that people could jeer at and mock that person who was stupid enough to get caught breaking the Roman laws. In fact, the third and final time that the word cross is used in Luke occurs in chapter 23 verse 26, where Jesus is on the way to His death and He is so weak from His beatings that Simon of Cyrene is pulled from the crowd and forced to carry the crossbar for Jesus.
So when Jesus says that “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple,” His words almost certainly stopped His listeners dead in their tracks. They never thought or even guessed that He was talking about His own death, but they surely understood that He was talking about their deaths. If you’re going to follow me, He is saying, then you must be prepared to die. That’s the price of discipleship – death. It’s a sobering picture, isn’t it? This is a whole lot more than just “an unpleasant situation or responsibility that you must accept because you cannot change it.” It’s certainly far more serious than “a heavy burden of responsibility or a problem that you alone must cope with.”
Jesus is saying is that when a believer – someone just like you – has been brought to faith, then Satan and the evil forces of our sinful world are going to throw everything at you to try to derail your faith, to convince you that being a Christian is just too hard, is too much of a human burden to bear. Sometimes our faith may be tested and assailed by our friends, our neighbors, our classmates, our co-workers. Sometimes our faith may even be tested and attacked by our own family members. When that happens – and sooner or later those attacks, do happen to all of us – then we have two and only two choices. We can give in, we can walk away, we can put God out of our minds and ultimately out of our hearts because that’s the easier path to follow. Or we can bear our own cross. We even can – as many have in the past – give our life for our faith.
Can you really do that? Neither can I. On our own, not a single one of us has the power – the strength – to follow Jesus in the way that he tells us to follow Him in these verses. Not a single one of us – through our own power – ever could or ever would carry our own cross even to death. Why? Because we’re weak. We’re sinners. As St. Paul says in the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” We simply do not have the power within ourselves to deny the world and follow Jesus. We can’t do it alone. The cost of discipleship is just too high.
And that, my friends, is the truly amazing thing about the salvation that we have been given by our Savior. Jesus knows that we can’t bear our own cross. Jesus knows how hard it is to truly and faithfully follow Him. Jesus knows that we can’t pay the price to make satisfaction for our own sins. Jesus knows that nothing we could ever possibly do would be good enough for God to forgive us for our transgressions.
So Jesus bears the cross for us. Jesus paid the price for us. Jesus the sinless Son of God suffered and died on that cross for the forgiveness of our sins. For the forgiveness of my sins. For the forgiveness of your sins. Because the true cost of discipleship is not the price that we pay, but the price that Jesus paid for us. The true cost of discipleship is nothing less than the bitter suffering and death on the cross of God’s only beloved Son.
As Christians, we do bear a cross, but it’s not the one we think of or see. At your baptism, the pastor called you by name and said these words: “Receive the sign of the holy cross both upon your forehead and upon your heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.” Those signs of the cross never go away. You bear them always. You will bear them to your grave. You will bear them to eternal life.
When we become confirmed members of the Church, we are asked these three questions:
- Do you intend to hear the Word of God and receive the Lord’s Supper faithfully?
- Do you intend to live according to the Word of God, and in faith, word, and deed to remain true to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even to death?
- Do you intend to continue steadfast in this confession and Church and to suffer all, even death, rather than fall away from it?
The answers that we give to those questions are not and must not be the simple words “I do.” Because on our own, we can’t. No matter how hard we try, we simply can’t. All of these questions funnel down to the cost of discipleship, and if we were to seriously but foolishly answer simply by saying “I do,” we would be making promises that we can’t keep. And that’s why we answer these questions by with these words: “I do, by the grace of God.”
By the grace of God, Jesus has paid the price of discipleship so that we don’t have to. That doesn’t mean that being a Christian will always be easy, for we all know that our sinful world sometimes makes it harder and harder for us to cling to our faith. But Jesus died for our sins, and He sends His Holy Spirit to bring us to faith. That is what we believe and that is what we confess. And ultimately, that is all we need.
Return to Pastor page
