Take up your cross

Luke 14:27-33 

²⁷ Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? ²⁹ Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, ³⁰ saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” ³¹ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³² If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. ³³ So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

“Taking up your cross to follow Jesus”

In the first century under Roman occupation this carried a far heavier political connotation than it does today.

We are more likely to equate “carrying a cross” with more generalized suffering like a health scare or an inescapable family crisis.

The cross though was a particularly savage means of execution that was reserved for sedition against the Roman state. Never forget that the charge nailed to Jesus’ cross – the eventual reason they proffered for carrying out Jesus’ crucifixion at all was the charge that Jesus claimed to be “The King of the Jews” - a direct threat to the absolute supremacy of the Roman emperor.

Jesus is saying that we should place the aims and values of the Kingdom of God above the values and aims of the secular authorities if they contradict each other– the Kingdom of God trumps the kingdoms of the world.

It is another way of saying “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”.

The values of God that shine through most from the pages of the Hebrew scriptures are Justice, freedom, humility and national self-determination.

We find these and other important values are the outworkings of the central law of Love through Jesus, which we learn through the pages of the New Testament as the fulfilment of all the law and the prophets.

So Christianity has always been political. Jesus was executed for a perceived political crime against an occupying foreign power. The Jews couldn’t have legally killed Jesus however much they might have wanted to – that could only be done by the real political power in the land.

Personal freedom and impartial Justice are kingdom values and wherever they are undermined or subverted anywhere in the world, it is a moral duty for any Christian to work to make sure they are upheld. They are bedrocks of the Western world and we are mighty fortunate to live in a country where however imperfectly these values still underpin our society.

Tom Holland, the author, has a thesis that all western civilisation is either consciously or subconsciously entirely suffused with Christian values. They are the default position of people who know or understand virtually nothing about Christianity or even fulminate against it.  We often get depressed about how small and insignificant we appear to be nowadays on the national and international stage, but the values of Christendom have sunk very deep indeed into the collective psyche of the western world and the whole world is a better place for it.