Abstract
What is the Christian life? What does it look like? Does it resemble a social club for the middle classes? Is it a course of therapy for those of us with 2.4 children and a nine-to-five? Does it consist of timely meetings with a roast in the oven? Festivals and conferences, t-shirts and wristbands, opulence tempered only by the occasional flourish of godliness? What is the Christian life? What does it look like? Is discipleship found in pretty buildings and illustrious titles? What about when we occupy seats on councils and speak at meetings, or when we have the ear of someone influential? Is Godliness measured by Britishness and holiness proved by comfort?
On Jesus’ terms, discipleship consists of self-denial. We are to take up our cross and follow him; walking the death march in his footsteps. To quote Bonhoeffer: ‘To endure the Cross is not a tragedy…[it] is an essential part of the specifically Christian life’. The early Christians were all-too-familiar with this. Paul tells Timothy to ‘share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus’ (2 Tim 2:3), writing elsewhere that ‘this is what we are destined for’ (1 Thess 3:3). Those who want to live a Godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Tim 3:12)—it is part and parcel of the Christian experience. If we bear the Name we must also share in his sufferings. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Polycarp would soon describe chains as the ornaments of saints.
‘The disciple’, said Henri Nouwen, ‘is the one who follows Jesus on his downward path and thus enters with him into new life. The gospel radically subverts the presuppositions of our upwardly mobile society. It is a jarring and unsettling challenge…. [We get] a taste of that mysterious joy in the smiles of those who have nothing to lose.’
It is not that Christians are gluttons for punishment; there is no virtue in suffering for suffering’s sake. Paul tells Timothy to pray for all those with the potential to make trouble for God’s people, so that we might live a quiet and peaceable life (1 Tim 2:2). Nevertheless, the witness of Scripture is clear: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’ (Mk 8:34). Do you ever wonder why? Why God would have us follow the Son through troubled waters? Sometimes I wish knew the specifics. My heart aches to tell someone who’s hurting precisely what God is doing. Instead we’re given a huge, panoramic vision of God’s purposes. ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed…. [We] are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh’ (2 Cor 4:7–11). So says Paul: you do not bear this cross without purpose. This world might attach happiness to circumstance, but watch what happens when circumstances fall apart and all but Jesus remains. Then we become like burning candles—literally, ‘martyrs’, witnesses to the new life found in Christ. In Athanasius’ words: ‘When the sun rises after the night and the whole world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven away the dark. Equally clear is it…that it is he himself who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to his victory in his own disciples’.
Few of us in the West will wear the martyr’s crown (Rev 2:10). We can thankfully worship freely, preach according to conscience and share our faith without fear of prosecution. Perhaps this is why it’s difficult to read passages such as Mark 8.31–38. If we’re not literally called to perish for Christ, then what does it mean to take up our cross and follow him? It might feel as if this is all for ‘someone else’—and yet (in Bonhoeffer’s words) ‘the Cross is laid on every Christian’. This will undoubtedly look different for every believer. For some it will look like physical suffering; for others, it will resemble mockery and abuse, perhaps mental ill health or family difficulties. All of us, however, will be called to the same life of self-denial. ‘When Christ calls a man’, says Bonhoeffer, ‘he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.’
Do not be surprised, therefore, when suffering comes (1 Pet 4). Do not be astonished if the world hates you (1 John 3:13). If we were of the world, the world would love us (John 15:19). But Christ has called us: ‘come and die!’ Not because God delights in our suffering, but because he would have us become monuments to his victory, living witnesses to that supreme joy found only in Jesus. How else will the world see him? If God’s people are just Christianised facsimiles of everyone else, we will soon blend into the background. But if having taken up our cross we can still say with the Psalmist, ‘My heart and my flesh may fail but you are the strength of my heart and my portion forever’ (Ps 73:26)—well, we shouldn’t then be surprised if the world sits up and takes notice.