Following in Jesus’ Footsteps

Proper 17A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

“Take up your cross and follow me,” Jesus said (Matt. 16:24). Preaching here in front of a 30-foot-tall cross made of red granite in a time when we encounter crosses nearly everywhere, it’s hard to imagine what effect these words had on the disciples. We must think back to a time when the cross was not a symbol of holiness but of shame, back to when the cross was not an instrument of grace, but of the power of Rome to humiliate, torture, and utterly erase its foes.

The disciples had invested three years following Jesus. They had suspended their lives and disrupted their families. They were encouraged by his miracles. They were inspired by his charismatic ability to draw large crowds. They had let themselves dare to imagine Jesus’ proclamations about the arrival of a new kingdom were true. “So, what could be more disorienting, more ludicrous, than the news that their would-be champion was determined to walk straight into a death trap? To give himself over not only to severe physical pain, but to humiliation and disgrace? To surrender without a fight to a common criminal’s death?” (Debi Thomas, “Losing and Saving,” Journey with Jesus, 8/23/20).

Peter took Jesus aside and scolded him upon hearing this grotesque prediction for the first time. Jesus responded with what may be the sharpest rebuke anywhere in scripture, “Get behind me Satan!” (16:23). Then he turned to the crowd and summed up his whole message in two sentences: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (v. 24). As Martin Luther might say, “Was ist das?” What is this? What does this mean?

Before we can answer we must clear away the obstacles that block our understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Modern people swim in a centuries old culture that has worked very hard to domesticate the cross and obscure the massive scandal that it was to ancient people. A God who dies on a cross doesn’t compute. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109) attempted to explain the meaning of the cross in connection with the medieval code of feudal honor and shame familiar to people in his time. Death on the cross, Anselm said, ‘was the price God demanded must be paid for human sin which needed to be paid by one who was equally divine to restore God’s honor.’

This idea, however well-intentioned turned God into the tyrant who demanded that Jesus’ die. It shifted the blame away from us and onto God. Despite being unbiblical, sadly, this idea is nearly ubiquitous today. It is part of the culture. Ask anyone on the street why Jesus had to die and people will most likely say it was to pay the debt God demanded must be paid for human sin. So, every Lent, we thank Jesus for having endured such an awful thing, while, at the same time, we are relieved of the burden of having to imitate him.

But Jesus did not say, watch me pick up this cross. He told us to take up our cross and follow him. The cross is not just something that happened to Jesus one day. It is a way of life. It is the way to life and the abundance of life to which we are gifted and called. “We believe in a Jesus-kind-of-Christ—a God who is going to the mat with humanity and not just presenting us with a heavenly, cosmic vision. If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/ resurrecting path of getting there.”  Follow me, Jesus said, walk the way of the cross to find new life…There is nothing really supernatural about love and suffering. It is completely natural, taking us through the deep interplay of death and life, surrender and forgiveness, in all their basic and foundational manifestations.  Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows us how to give away our life, how to give away our love, and eventually how to give away our death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.” (Richard Rohr, Following in Jesus’ Footsteps,” Daily Meditations, 8/30/26)

Among many teachers, preachers, prophets, and mystics of the church, St. Francis, taught, countering Anselm, that the cross was not necessary to satisfy God. Instead, the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Love on God’s part. Jesus freely chose to go to the cross to show us that God’s love for us is unbreakable, however violent and depraved our actions may be to reject that love. The empty cross proclaims that your ideas about God are too small. Let me show you, Jesus says, who you are created to be. Let go of your petty fears, your love of comfort, and your egoistic striving. Let go of your small, ego “self,” and awaken to the grandeur of yourself rooted in God, the Divine Life, deep within your center, in whom you live and move and have your being.

Jesus’ “bad” news is the Good News. “To take up a cross as Jesus did is to stand, always, in the center of the world’s pain. Not just to glance in the general direction of suffering and then sidle away, but to dwell there. To identify ourselves with those who are aching, weeping, screaming, and dying. To insist that our comfort isn’t worth it unless the least and the lost can share in it, too.” (Thomas)

“Taking up the cross means… accepting — against all the lies of my culture — that I will die. It means following up that courageous acceptance with the most important question I can ask: given my inevitable death, how shall I spend this brief, singular, God-breathed life?” (Thomas)

“Shall I hoard it in fear, or give it away in hope? Shall I protect myself with numbness and apathy, or experience the abundant life Jesus offers to those who ache, weep, and bleed alongside the world’s suffering? Shall I, like Peter, push suffering away at all costs — and in doing so, push Jesus away, too? Or shall I accompany the one I call Savior down the only road that actually leads to eternal life?” (Thomas)

“There is a spectator version of Christianity out there, and plenty of people decide to live it. But let’s not pretend for one moment that it’s the version Jesus calls us to. Let’s not fool ourselves into assuming that faith-on-the-sidelines will grant us safety, immunity, joy, or blessing. It will not. Those who save their lives will lose them. Those who lose their lives will save them. That’s the truth Jesus vindicated when he died and rose from the grave. We can take it or leave it.” (Thomas)
Dear church, can we be the sort of church that helps one another to bear crosses instead of building them? Jesus rebuked Peter for his failure to see that his vocation involved suffering as well as glory. Anyone who thinks the gospel is a path to prosperity will here be confronted with the dark and painful reality of the cross.

For his forty years of faithfulness to God’s call, the prophet Jeremiah (our first reading) was beaten (20:2), threatened with death (26:8), imprisoned (37:15), thrown down a well (38:6), and derided as an unpatriotic traitor. Almost no one listened to him. He was an isolated man of “reproach” among his own people (15:15). Maybe that’s why Jeremiah reminded early Christians so much of Jesus. Jeremiah was a Christ-figure: in dying to self he lived to God and for others. Jeremiah shows us that in losing our lives we find them. (Daniel Clendenin, My Journey with Jesus)

With a song on our lips and love in our hearts, Jesus calls to us, to follow his footsteps. “Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name? Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same? Will you risk the hostile stare, should your life attract or scare? Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?” (“Will you Come and Follow Me?” ELW # 798)