Take Up Your Cross

The first thing you will learn from the direction-book is that suffering in itself is simply distress, while suffering with love is a cross. (If it is task-related, it might be called a yoke). The bottom line is your ability to grasp the full implication of what a cross really is and what it is designed to do for you. That itself is a grace from God.

A typical commercial plane can carry about 1.3 times its own weight in passengers and luggage. Aerodynamically speaking, a dragonfly is superior: It can easily flight-lift seven times its own weight. But when the burdens of life weight us humans down, we find that we just don’t fly. From the time of Christ, people have given a name to these burdens: They’re called crosses.

Even before Jesus carried and died on his own cross, he told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). In citing that classic passage, we often overlook the word “daily.” For most persons it is not too hard to put up with even a heavy burden for a short while. But on our long “transcontinental” flight from here to eternity, long-term hardships – that is, the daily ongoing troubles – can be truly wearisome. It’s not the sword thrust of martyrdom that’s hard; it’s the persistent, frequent, daily pinpricks.

Yet the weight of our burdens seems to decrease as our strength increases with daily, love-charged perseverance. Every burden-wearies person can find strength-restoring rest in loving intimacy with Jesus. His words encompass one of the most touching but least acknowledged expressions of God’s gentle loving mercy:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30).

We find this rest in Jesus only if we profoundly understand the first three words of the passage and put them into practice in a meaningful way: “Come to me.” For only in that heart-to-heart union with the Lord can we receive the “rest” that he promises. The invitation is reiterated in Hebrews 4:16: “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Among the common burdens that we humans bear, that of illness deserves a special word of explanation. There is no scriptural indication that sickness is part of “God’s will” or an end in itself. But our Catholic faith recognizes the value of “redemptive” human suffering. All human suffering is extrinsic – that is, not intrinsically the cause of the divine act of redemption, although it may conjoin it. Yet suffering an be “intrinsic” in that its cause is a force inside oneself. When properly embraced as God’s will, it enjoys a “participatively redemptive” power that is derived from one’s spiritual union with Christ in his redemptive suffering.

This is explained in several paradoxical “rejoice in suffering” passages. One is from Paul, Colossians 1:24: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” And Peter wrote in the same context of rejoicing in suffering, even embracing it with delight: “[R]ejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). This is a delight now in the hardship of suffering but in being incorporated into the divine dynamic of the great redemptive act of God toward his infected but deeply loved human race.

Archbishop Sheen once poetized the concept with the remark that by such “co-redemptive” suffering anyone can be said to be “a redeemer with a small r.” Any person who is gifted with this ability to rejoice in sufferings because of being redemptively united with the Redeemer is a person who sees the unavoidable sufferings as camouflaged treasures of God’s mercy.

An analogy may help to understand how one can rejoice in suffering although not because of it. Consider the patient who eagerly submits to surgery though knowing that it will be painful. The person can be happy about the medical procedure because it will provide healing ultimately. Such a person realizes the tremendous advantage of having a skilled surgeon available when the vast majority of humans lack even basic medical care.

Similarly, the spiritually mature person sees hardship not as mere pain but as love-clothed pain. The pain is a cross but also a paradoxical unfolding of the Lord’s mercy – his merciful love. Embracing God-sent or God-allowed suffering with a surrendering love releases floods of grace on such a soul as well as inestimable heavenly rewards or merits. The Divine Mercy aspect of the situation is the person’s awareness that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain,” as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15:58.

But “extrinsic” suffering, whether caused by the malice of others (persecution, social injustice, and unloving spouse and so forth) or by non-malicious means (such as weather inclemency or accidents), are situations that express God’s permissive will. Jesus’ counsel to “take up your cross and follow me” refers mainly to this extrinsic suffering. He himself was victimized in being condemned and tortured to death on Calvary. On the other hand, it is safe to assume that God usually wants us to be healed of sickness ( a type of intrinsic suffering). Much has been written on this subject in charismatic healing literature, expounding the so-called “fourth century theology of suffering.”

It seems that Jesus’ suffering during his earthly life was entirely and “extrinsic” form of summering. He certainly experiences the normal discomforts of hunger, fatigue, heat and cold and so on, but free as he was from the contamination of original sin, he probably never experienced illness in his perfectly healthy body. Yet he suffered far more that almost any one of us has ever suffered. In this sense he was like us; “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15).