Religious symbols are complex by design. There are good reasons for this: religious traditions deal with complex topics, histories, and relationships, and none of this can be reduced to simple images. Religious symbols mark a whole world of meaning-making.
Religion’s complexity appears in the multiple layers religious symbols carry with them into our shared work of interpretation. We can’t deal with all of the layers in a given symbol all at once, but we should remember that there’s always more than one way to read them.
I reminded myself of all this as I tried (and failed) to write a sermon about “the meaning of the cross” on a Lenten Sunday when that symbol was directly in our line of vision. The cross is the most recognizable symbol of Christianity and arguably the central symbol of Christian faith. It’s also soaked in violence and suffering, and framed with betrayal and abandonment. Often forgotten, early Christian traditions also depicted the cross as a blossoming tree, a fruit-laden vine, and a shimmering object of divine glory.
Poignant stories, striking visual art, rich musical settings—all of these contribute to a long history of engaging in various ways with this one symbol. That history has been both insightful and sometimes deeply troubling. Given that complex history, I’m convinced of at least this much: the need always to read the cross with the hope of new life.
The Lenten lectionary gave us a passage yesterday morning from Mark’s account of the Gospel in which Jesus predicts his own death (8:31-38). When Peter recoils from this, horrified, Jesus seems to suggest the divine necessity of this painful path—not only for himself but for any who would live as his follower.
As Mark’s Jesus urges his disciples to take up their own cross (8:34), we Christians need to stop foisting it on others. I mean, how that symbol shows up in ordinary, everyday speech. Or more severely, in cases of domestic abuse, when a woman is told that she must remain with her violent husband because, well, that’s just the “cross she has to bear.”
As friend of the poor and outcast, and champion of the oppressed, beloved Jesus would never say such a thing—not ever.
The profound damage wrought by otherwise well-meaning Christians needs to stop right now. So let’s be crystal clear: the God of abundant life whom we encounter in Jesus does not demand sacrifice for its own sake, does not demand sacrifice of any kind, and certainly not from those trapped in systems of abuse.
How then do we deal with this particular passage from Mark’s account of the Gospel? We might recall that first-century readers would know very well that crucifixion was the means by which the Roman Empire executed political dissidents, and kept slaves and the underclass under control by terrorizing people into submission. There were times in Palestine’s history as a Roman province when the road to Jerusalem was littered with crosses and crucified bodies—that’s an image Mark’s readers would recall only too well.
That’s not the only way to interpret the Cross of Christ, for sure, but it is a powerful way of framing the death of Jesus—the Jesus who disrupts imperial order, who disturbs the cultural peace, who overturns the tables of economic injustice. This is the Jesus who must be silenced, who must not be allowed to live.
But Mark won’t let us stop there. “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it,” he says, “and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (8:34-35).
As someone who grew up as (mostly) “the best little boy in the world,” and still lives (mostly) as a well-behaved adult—a respectable (mostly) member of the clergy, no less!—I have trouble imagining whatever “cross” it is I’m supposed to pick up and carry.
As I reflected on this classic exhortation from Marks’ Jesus, I thought once again of Nkululeku, the young bartender I met in Johannesburg on my recent trip to southern Africa. I wrote about him here a few weeks ago; his name in Zulu means Freedom.
In that encounter with a Black man, I felt my whiteness intensely. I don’t mean my own skin color or my latent racism—I mean the cultural system of Whiteness and Blackness that kept us separated from each other; a system that relies on erecting barriers of distrust between two people just because of our skin color; a system that thrives on suspicion. We did not create that system, but Nkululeku and I were nonetheless firmly stuck in it.
I realized something else in that moment: liberation from such a system is actually a painful process. Longstanding cultural systems make the world a familiar place; even when those systems function like prisons, staying trapped there can feel safer than venturing out into an unknown world of freedom. Healing from old wounds can feel risky, especially when the wounds are all we’ve ever known.
This is surely what Jesus means, at least in part, when he insists that losing our life is how we save it. Hearing that insistence on the last Sunday of Black History Month can frame the cost of discipleship quite distinctly. That cost can be measured in many different ways, but not least with this: by how much we disrupt the cultural systems that feel comfortable but actually cause painful and even violent divisions. Perhaps for those of us who benefit the most from the cultural systems of division, the Gospel “cross” to bear is the willingness to live as agitators for a new way of life.
That word “agitation” can take on many guises, too. I thought of this while watching the wonderful performance by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs during this year’s Grammy Awards. They sang a duet of Chapman’s 1988 classic song “Fast Car.” One commentator urged us to notice that a black folk singer and a white country music singer “came together to sing a song about belonging. America is starved for connection across divides,” this commentator wrote, “and that performance shows how much music has the power to heal.”
Healing in this case meant Chapman and Combs appearing with each other on stage, defying the current cultural system—which seems to be gaining strength by the day—that insists on keeping black and white separate, even violently divided.
Reflecting on Mark’s Jesus, I couldn’t get Chapman’s “Fast Car” out of my head. It includes these lyrics: “And I—I had a feeling that I belonged / I, I had a feeling I could be someone / be someone / be someone.”
“Take up your cross,” Jesus says, “and follow me.”
Live like an irritant, Jesus says, a trouble-maker, a grave problem for any cultural system that makes hatred normal and violence common.
Be someone who causes “good trouble,” as John Lewis would say. Be someone who disturbs a wounded world with healing.
Be someone who insists on replacing suspicion with trust, even when the price is our own safety and comfort.
Actually, I can’t do that by myself. That’s something else I learned in my encounter with Nkululeku, and it’s something I want to bring with me to Christian worship. I really can’t “be someone” on my own; I need others to “be someone” with me, all of us together.
It seems to me that’s exactly what happens at the Eucharistic Table: we gather around a simple meal of bread and wine and we do indeed become someone—that meal makes us the Body of Christ.
Living as that “Someone” puts us on the road toward the Cross. Thanks to Nkululeku, I now know the name of that road—it’s Freedom.
