Take Up Your Cross

(The following is a homily given for the Catholic Community of Enid on the Friday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, 8/7/15)

Reading 1 Dt 4:32-40
Responsorial Psalm PS 77:12-13, 14-15, 16 and 21
Gospel Mt 16:24-28

Sometimes I wonder if I really want to follow Jesus. He is a good example, yes; I’ll even give him the fact that he is God. He came to redeem me, and I’m grateful, but do I really want to follow him?

To follow Him means that my life will be turned upside down; it means that I will have to confront my sinfulness and work to rid myself of it. It means that I will be humbled and humiliated, by what is done to me, or by what I myself do. It means that I will experience great loneliness, great suffering, great sadness. It means that I will have to take up my cross.

Knowing all of this, I wonder if I really want to follow Jesus. My cross is painful and splintered. It is so heavy that it brings me to my knees. It is weighed down by my anger, my greed, my sloth, my pride, my lust, my envy, my indulgence. It reopens wounds in my soul that have begun to heal, as if in spite of any work on my part to bandage them.

I do not want this cross. And yet if I am to follow Christ, I must take it up. I must embrace it; I must cling to it; I must love it – because it is the same cross our Lord carried. He carried this very cross of mine to Calvary.

What we do in taking up our cross is allow our Lord and Savior to carry it for us. It is in taking up our crosses that we lay them down in front of Jesus; it is in dying to our fears that we find life in Him.

So, shall we follow Jesus? Shall we take up our cross? Shall we allow our cross to bring us to our knees, to humble us, to remind us of our need for God’s grace? Our need for God’s Love?