It’s a well-known fact that in order to accomplish anything good, there will be sacrifices involved. To win at sports takes the discipline of exercise. To excel at school means long hours hitting the books. To succeed in your career means working hard and continuing to improve. And to possess the joys of everlasting life takes the Cross.
This Gospel directly follows one of Jesus’ predictions of His own Passion. He had just told His disciples that He was going to be rejected and crucified, and the very next scene shows James and John wanting glory. Oh, they had faith that He would be King – but they wanted the Kingdom without the Cross.
So Jesus brings them back down to earth. “Can you drink the cup that I will drink?” He asks – the Cup of His sufferings and trials. And He asks that same question to us – do you want the glories of Heaven? Do you want to enjoy God for eternity? Then are you willing to embrace the Cross as the path to Heaven? There is no other road to the Lord except the royal road of the Cross.
Let me illustrate some crosses that followers of Jesus must endure:
First, the suffering of denying your desires. St. Augustine was a saint who lived a very sinful life during his early years – he had a live-in mistress out of wedlock and pursued pleasure and fame with abandon. But even after his conversion, he found it difficult to say “no” to his old sins. Famously, he once prayed, “Lord, give me chastity…but not yet!” It was only through grace (and a whole lot of self-denial) that he was able to overcome the desire for lust. What is it for you that you must deny? Lust? Greed? Gluttony and eating too much? A desire to be the center of attention? An unhealthy desire for praise, or for money? A worship of sports? To be a disciple is to suffer the denial of these sinful desires.
Second, the suffering of loneliness and misunderstanding. Many people will question and doubt a follower of Jesus. Do you really have to skip the baseball game to get to Mass? Why don’t you go out drinking with the rest of us? You really don’t watch “Desperate Housewives”? You believe in the sanctity of human life from conception until natural death? Just recently I was Googling a priest-friend from seminary, to see what he was up to these days, and one of the first responses that came up was a letter to the editor about him, calling Fr. Michael a “poor, narrow-minded bigot” for believing that marriage was between one man and one woman. Recently you may have seen that the President of France was criticizing women who chose to have large families, saying that it was impossible to be both successful and open to life. What an insult to those parents who are choosing to be generous with God! This misunderstanding and even rejection, from family, friends, and society as a whole – is to be expected if we are truly faithful to the Gospel.
Third, embracing the sufferings of everyday life – and lifting them up to the Lord. I think of the example of St. Bernadette Soubirous. She is best known as the saint who saw the Blessed Mother at Lourdes in France, where Mary appeared to her several times and caused a stream to flow from the rocky mountainside with healing waters. But St. Bernadette’s holiness is not simply because of seeing Mary. She also united her many, many sufferings to Jesus. She was always a sick child, suffering from asthma and other illnesses, and after she saw Mary and entered the convent, she developed a painful cancerous tumor on her knee. Many of her friends urged her to go to Lourdes, so that she could perhaps be cured by the miraculous waters. But she responded, “My business is to suffer, because here on this earth there is no love without suffering.” All of her pains, her humiliations, just the daily sufferings of being human – she united all of that to Christ’s Cross so intensely that she said one time, “Jesus, I do not feel my crosses when I think of Your Cross.” We too can take the aches and pains, the insults and misunderstandings, the humiliations and the stress and struggles – and we can look at Jesus’ Cross and say, “Lord, I offer this to You who suffered for me!”
One might say, with all of the sufferings of following Jesus, why bother? Because, as St. Paul says, “The sufferings of the present time are as nothing compare to the glory to be revealed in us.” As St. Maximilian Kolbe said, “For Jesus Christ, I am prepared to suffer still more.” We embrace the Cross, but we keep the Resurrection in view. Glory and suffering are always united in Christianity.
So do not be afraid to embrace the three Crosses, that we may all share in the glory of the Resurrection.
Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time/Year B, Isaiah 53:10-11, Hebrews 4:14-16, Mark 10:35-45 Or Mark 10:42-45
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Originally published at The Cross Stands While the World Turns
Photo: Luis Galvez, Unsplash / PD-US
