Ep 94 - The Cross That Carries You

Episode 94 explores the mystery of suffering and the meaning behind Jesus’ call to “take up your cross.” Reflecting on surrender, identity, and the struggle between the false self and the true self hidden in Christ, this episode examines how suffering can become a path toward freedom, humility, and deeper trust in God. Through stories, scripture, and spiritual reflection, it considers how the crosses we carry may ultimately become the bridge toward discovering who we truly are.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 94 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the 13th Sunday in ordinary time. There is a story told about a man who was carrying his cross on the journey of life, and as he walked along, he stopped and looked up to the sky and complained to the Lord, saying, Lord, you know what? I know that everyone has to carry their cross, but mine's rather heavy. So I wonder if I could make it a bit shorter. Would you allow me to to cut off maybe just about a foot of the end of my cross? So he gets out his saw, cuts off, saws off a bit at the end of the cross and then picks up his cross and yeah, Lord, this is much lighter. I can carry this cross now. So he walks on. After a few hours, the cross is getting heavy again for him. So he turns to the Lord and says, Lord, you know, if I could just cut off a bit more of my cross, I think I'd be able to make it to the end of the journey. So he gets out his saw and saws off maybe another foot of the end of his cross. Now he looks around and notices that his cross is a lot shorter than the other crosses that other people are carrying as they walk along and make their journey in life. But he figures, look, my cross is now a lot lighter, I'll be able to make this journey, no problem. I'll be able to get to the end of this journey now. As they walk along in the journey, they come to a ravine. There's a cliff, it's a shear drop about 50 meters down, but on the other side of the cliff is another cliff with a shear drop. There's a gap that needs to be crossed in order to cross this ravine. The other people who haven't cut their crosses, who still have their original crosses, are able to put their crosses down and form a bridge so that they can cross over the ravine from the top of one cliff out onto the other top of the cliff. But when this guy who's been cutting his cross tries to use his cross as a bridge so that he can walk across the ravine, his cross is obviously too short. That's where he realizes why God gave him a long cross so that he'd be able to cross over that ravine. And I think that this story reveals to us the fact that we don't always understand why we have to carry the crosses that we are given to carry. In today's gospel, Jesus tells us that anyone who does not pick up their cross and carry it is not worthy of him. If this man in our story knew from the start that the reason that he was called to carry such a long cross was so that he would be able to cross the ravine, he surely would have resisted taking shortcuts and cutting his cross so that it becomes shorter. But in our lives we don't really have the luxury of understanding why we must carry a cross at a particular time. As Soren Kiergaard once said, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Often our suffering seems meaningless and completely pointless. If only God could tell us plain and simple the reason why we have been saddled with a particular burden, we'd probably be a lot more eager to carry it. Victor Frankel, who survived four Nazi concentration camps, once said that as long as you have the right why, you can deal with almost any how. If we can find a purpose in carrying our cross, then we can be prepared to deal with almost any cross, no matter how heavy, as long as the purpose is right. The problem is often that we find suffering so pointless, so meaningless, especially suffering that arises from causes beyond our control, like the sickness of a loved one, or the suffering that results from a very difficult relationship. Sure, we can search around for reasons, but I'm sure at the end of the day we will be confronted with the fact that none of the reasons that we can come up with seems to justify the loss of so much joy and peace that this suffering occasions in our lives. And we want to cry out to the Lord and say, Lord, you know, I'll carry any cross, but just not this one. We may never understand the reason for which we have been settled with a particular cross. But the good news of Christianity is that we don't have to understand why we are carrying a cross in order to find meaning in carrying it. The good news of Christianity is that even without understanding the precise reason for our suffering, we can find meaning in it by uniting it to the suffering of Christ. When we unite our suffering to Christ's suffering, we are assured that God will bring meaning out of this suffering and redeem it, just as he redeemed the suffering of Jesus on the cross and wrought our salvation out of it. Because of Christ on the cross, we now have a why that can enable us to endure almost any how. In uniting our sufferings to those of Christ, we learn an essential lesson, that of surrender. To return to the image of the ravine in the story, I would suggest to you that the ravine that our sufferings help us to cross is not so much a particular event in our lives, as it is a fundamental spiritual attitude. All of us have to make a journey from self-sufficiency to surrender. The mistake that the man in the story made was to think that he had to carry his cross by his own strength. And his own strength was not enough to cope with the long cross, and that's why he cut it. Suffering teaches us three important lessons. Number one, that we are not in control of our lives. Number two, that we are not alone in trying to deal with the fallout when we lose control of our lives. And number three, that the best response to this situation is to surrender. This is why what Christ means in today's gospel when he says, whoever finds their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. Learning to lose our lives is precisely learning to surrender to God. We can only save our lives by letting go of them and falling into God. We must also realize that often much of our suffering is self-inflicted, as it comes from our own bruised egos. When life decides to knock us a peg or two down, and we discover to our horror that other people see us quite differently from the way that we have been accustomed to seeing ourselves, our egos take a battering. The natural response to this is to go into defensive mode and to try and nurse our bruised ego back to health again. This only compound pounds our suffering, as we let all the insults and hurt that we have experienced echo again and again in our minds in an attempt to see if there is any scrap of dignity that we can salvage from the situation. But if we abandon our egos, if we agree to die to our false self, we find a new life and freedom in Christ. This is another way of understanding what Jesus means when he says that the one who tries to save their life loses it, the one who loses their life finds it. It's also somewhat similar to what the Buddhist tradition teaches when it says that the self is an illusion, so it is best to just let go of the self, let go of your ego. However, there's an important difference in that the Christian faith does not invite us to obliterate ourselves altogether. Rather, it tells us that it is only once we are prepared to let go of our false selves that we discover our true selves. This is the message that is contained in Paul's letter to the Colossians, when he says that our true selves are hidden with Christ in God. So instead of telling others who we are, namely, I am a banker, I am a lawyer, I am the wife of so and so, I am the son of so and so, we must let God tell us who we are. This is the way that we die. We must let go of the image that others have of us and allow God to form that image in whatever way God chooses. But this requires humility and patience as we surrender our identity into God's hands, because the answer will not come immediately. God will often speak through other people around us and use them to slowly reveal to us our true selves that are hidden with Christ in God. There is nothing quite like the power of suffering to strip away the false self and to get rid of all the crutches that we have created to sustain the illusion of our own self-independence. Perhaps the ravine that needs to be crossed in our lives is the crossover from the false self to the real self that is hidden with Christ in God. In a way, it is only really suffering that can dislodge our identity from the comfort of the false self. This is why it is only with a cross that the crossover can be made. If, like the man in the story, we have taken shortcuts to avoid suffering, we will never become uncomfortable enough with our false selves to want to cross the ravine and discover our true selves. This actually means that we should be grateful for the suffering that we encounter in our lives, for it plays this critical role of stripping away our false selves and showing us that we do not have to defend this ego because we have another self that is incomparably more beautiful than the false self that we have made for ourselves, and that it is this self that we are called to discover as we lean into Christ, as we die to self, so that we might find our true selves. God bless, and have a good Sunday.