Cross culture - Mark 8:31-38 - Column

Christian Century, Feb 16, 1994 by Patrick J. Willson

CROSSES ARE this season's most voguish fashion accessory. In a New Yorker cartoon, two avenue trend-setters notice the pectoral cross on a bearded Orthodox patriarch and comment admiringly, "Fantastic crucifix!"

To investigate this "huge fashion thing" the magazine's "Talk of-the Town" writer visited a new boutique at Macy's--improbably named "Cross Culture." A clerk explained that "crosses are a fashion statement. This counter used to have silk starves and evening bags. That's gone. Now we're doing trend-type crosses here .... We have one of the best selections in New York City, but honestly, I'm a little low on crosses right now. They're flying out the door."

Considering the cross as fashionable adornment for the chic may strike us as an ironic whimsy, but we can hardly regard it as strange. Most of us have a few pretty crosses lying around in boxes somewhere. And given the commonplace origins of most liturgical garb, I suppose that wearing a pectoral cross while leading worship was once part of a trend.

Crosses are attractive. Whether made of gold or brass or carved wood, something about the symmetry of a cross is pleasing and satisfying-so much so, in fact, that we can scarcely hear, much less comprehend, the outrageousness of Jesus' proposal: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."

In notes for the new HarperCollins Study Bible, Clifton Black makes the terse identification: "Cross, an instrument of torturous execution." An instrument of torturous execution shaped out of gold or silver, decked out with pearls or rubies or maybe only colored glass and plastic: it's the sort of ornament devotees of some hollow-eyed heavy-metal band might adopt as a token of their grim loyalty. It most definitely does not seem like a sign of life.

Yet that is precisely what the Gospel of Mark insists that it is. For those who would "save their life," the cross is the only way. Clinging to life fearfully, we cannot open our hands to receive the gift of life; acquiring the things of life, we are dragged down and under by their weight.

Was it Mark who first symbolized the Christian dynamic of saving one's life by losing it in bearing a cross? For Mark, nothing is closer to the heart of the matter than the cross. Jesus's true identity is revealed publicly only after Jesus loses his own life on the cross and the centurion shouts, "Truly this man was God's Son!" Mark suggests that like Christ, our true identities will be disclosed only after we too carry the cross.

Perhaps an early Christian prophet first framed the metaphor. Dizzy from contemplating the life and death of Jesus, he might have concluded his exhortation to an imitatio Christi with this reckless figure of speech. Or was it Jesus himself, aware of where his preaching and teaching would lead him, who consigned himself and his followers to living forever under the shadow of this "instrument of torturous execution"? Although the fellows of the Jesus seminar "would not include this item in the primary data base for determining who Jesus was," it is difficult to imagine that Jesus was unaware of the political repercussions of his words and deeds. And surely he did not expect his followers to fare better than he did.

Let them deny themselves and take up their cross..." The words endure in the tough matrix of Mark's Gospel like a diamond embedded in granite. Other sayings are easier to tolerate. "What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" sounds enough like "You can't take it with you" to be useful. But what use can we possibly make of "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me"?

Like Peter we object on reasonable grounds. There must be another way. We've taken courses in conflict management: surely we can negotiate an accommodation acceptable to all parties. We can replace words. We can find a way of phrasing Christian discipleship that does not involve "instruments of torturous execution."

The words endure, however, haunting us. Deny yourselves. Take up your cross. Follow me. These words are hideously unfashionable at all times. Nothing about them appeals to our sense of proportion or beauty, for we surrender proportion and beauty when we embrace the cross. "He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isa. 53:2). Our best attempts to prettily the cross or tame its dreadful claim ring hollow.

Surely Peter is right. There must be another way. He probably has something in mind. But...

There is no other way.