Some years ago a church in Manhattan printed a plain cross on a white background and underneath it inscribed the title of a current Broadway play, “Design for Living.”
The irony caught the attention of many passers-by because execution on a cross seems to most of us just the opposite: a design for dying, a guarantee of failure.
Of course, we know that Jesus died on a cross, but he was exonerated by God three days later. That puts a nice ending on a story that otherwise would have ended as a cosmic tragedy.
Good for Jesus! We are so glad the cross didn't win in the end! So, during this Lenten and Easter season Christians will observe the Good Friday "Bad News" and focus on what the cross of Christ means for our personal and collective salvation. We behold the cross of Calvary because of the ultimate benefit it represents for us through Jesus. He died for our sins! Hooray for Jesus!
Design for Living
This is fine — as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. We need not only to behold the cross of Christ, but also to acknowledge the crosses life has placed before us.
It means accepting the way of the cross as a design, not just for dying, but also for living our own lives. That doesn't mean we have to go out looking for crosses.
Some of the early Christians actually sought to become martyrs for the faith. I don't think Jesus sought to be a martyr; he sought to be obedient to God's call and that resulted in his martyrdom. To live for Christ is not optional to the Christian, but he calls us to die for him only when the world will not have it any other way.
Consider, then, that lots of people become Christians so that they can avoid crosses altogether. Crosses, they think, are fine for Jesus and various super-saints, but "Not for us!"
It is not that God sends us crosses, but that life does. And life is able to do that because of the free will with which God has endowed us.
Crosses are the results of the human capacity for sin and error and a natural order that cannot be brought under our control. So, God does not keep us from crosses, but he does help become victors over them. As Charles Haddon Spurgeon once proclaimed: "There are no crown-wearers in heaven who were not cross-bearers here below."
In varying degrees of severity and pain crosses go with the human territory. Your cross or my cross may not reach the level of Christ's passion, but there will be crosses along the way of life for all of us.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that crosses are the consequences you bring upon yourself by violating your conscience. They are the grief and pain you do not directly cause, but cannot or will not escape.
Crosses Galore
Your cross may come with a pink slip at the job you have been faithfully performing for the past 10 years. It may be a child born with a brain or neurological defect. It may be a husband whom you took "in health and in sickness" and who all too soon becomes a permanent patient.
Or your cross may be something with which you have no personal relationship, but which you take upon yourself to lighten someone else's load: a safe-house for battered wives, a counseling service for the unemployed, or volunteered time with Habitat For Humanity. Who took your cross? No one took it; you just may not be seeing it or recognizing it.
Thomas a Kempis counsels us: "Carry the cross patiently, and with perfect submission; and in the end it shall carry you.
If you bear the cross unwillingly, you make it a burden, and load yourself more heavily: but you must needs bear it. If you cast away one cross, you will certainly find another and perhaps a heavier."
If there is no cross in life for you, it is not because someone took it. It is because you are ignoring it. Just remember: the longer you ignore it, the heavier it becomes.
