Alex Swain

Friends,

I have been contemplating, for a few months now, how it is that one can offer oneself wholly and completely unto God. One’s life - each moment, each memory, each experience, each tick of the passing of time - given to Him Who Gives To Us as an oblation, a free-will sacrifice.

And I am constantly brought back to gaze horribly and beautifully at the cross, a cross not emptied but standing resolute with Jesus nailed upon it. Gazing at The God Who Suffered on our behalf to defeat death and truly liberate us. Time and time again my contemplations, prayers, and readings of scripture bring me back to this Truth, that it is in Jesus and the singularity of the Cross where the beginning of the self-offering begins, and where it finds its conclusion.

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus is steadily marching toward His torturous death on the gruesome and shameful cross. Jesus speaks of his worldly rejection, immense suffering, his death, and his rising again 3 days later “quite openly” to which St. Peter rebukes him. Jesus promptly calls him Satan, naturally.

It then reads, “He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). 

In this season, as we approach Good Friday and the joy of Easter, I wonder what significance we may gain to contemplate, imagine, and visualize ourselves taking up our heavy, wooden crosses not in an abstract way, but in a truly literal way. To be on the road behind Jesus, exhausted and bloodied, shoulders aching under the strain of the massive wooden tool of execution, stumbling to where He will be crucified, and we alongside Him.

Jesus states, “Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?” (8:37). Our life is given, all things are given us by God, and we can do naught but take up our crosses and follow Christ. I will be contemplating this in the coming days as Lent marches on and we approach the absolute and central core of our faith, which is the salvation of the world.

I will leave you with some words from Mtr. Fleming Rutedge’s The Crucifixion (p. 3):

“The utter uniqueness of the New Testament gospel is not the foolishness (of the cross, as St. Paul notes - added by Alex, not Mtr. Fleming) itself, but the linkage of holy foolishness to an actual historical event of government sponsored torture and public execution - a happening, it must be emphasized, without any spiritual overtones or redeeming religious features. It is not easy to gain a hearing for this crucial point, because so much American Christianity today comes packaged as inspirational uplift - sunlit, backlit, or candlelit. Furthermore, we are so accustomed to seeing the cross functioning as a decoration that we can scarcely imagine it as an object of shame and scandal unless it is burned on someone’s lawn. It requires considerable effort of the imagination to enter into the first-century world of the Roman Empire so as to understand the degree of offensiveness attached to crucifixion as a method of execution.”

In Christ,

Alex Swain