Carry Your Cross to Find Resurrection
by Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts
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Readings
Matthew 16:21-28
From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!” Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done. “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
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The cross is an interesting branding symbol for most of Christianity – as it’s the instrument of the murder of God, according to the Christian scriptures. But whatever our faith and despite our feelings about the cross, the image of it can serve as a heavy metaphor for the weight that we each carry, with compassionate strength and patience enabled by God(dess). Christ himself asked us to continue to carry our crosses and follow him, pointing toward the spiritual health that can be found as we accept our histories and move steadily forward with our eyes on that warmth and the light of consciousness at the root of our souls, inviting us to loving care and the peaceful dawn of a new day.
Today we reflect on resurrection – celebrating the resurrection of God as Christ, as well as the resurrection that Divinity empowers in each of our spirits. Resurrection is a theme found throughout the world’s religions, with many ancient traditions also writing of a resurrected and resurrecting Divinity. But the resurrection closest to home, and what I believe to be the point of these scriptural resurrections, is the revitalization of our souls into spiritual health and peace.
I think the key point and the ultimate joy of the resurrection for us (and for God) is the promise, the process, and the hope for our own healing as well as that of all people. Although hope may sometimes be dismissed by spiritual sages as being as hurtful as fear, I think that hope is often a good place to start in our spiritual resurrection journey. Having hope and a growing awareness of a brighter day, of our own unfurling Easter Sunday, calling us forward to carry our crosses toward it – instead of staying collapsed under it.
Collapsing under our cross is an unfortunate ongoing reality for many of us. Not just into the black holes of depression, fear, and anxiety, but also under the spiraling cravings, distractions, aversions, and internal ramblings we all can have. Instead of finding peace and the strength to center ourselves on our intrinsic, peaceful awareness as we walk toward the Lord’s light, we all can fall off the wagon, or, most likely, feel like we were never on it.
One lesson that psychology and our scriptures invite us toward to help us pick up our crosses, is realizing that we are not our cross. We are not our internal ramblings, disconnected feelings, selfishness, or projections (judgments) onto other people, but we often identify as such without even knowing it. We are not our bodies, our histories, our pains, our minds, our fears, or our current situations, but we’ve learned to identify these things as “me” instead of the greater awareness that observes these things in peace. We’ve been trying to get our crosses to walk when we must instead learn to stand up under them.
The scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg believed that the Lord came into the world as Jesus in order to reorder the hells and set heaven aright, so that we may more easily turn to him, to God, to enable our own cross-carrying toward resurrection. This newly empowered healing was for all faiths and peoples, no matter their understanding of the historical Christ – since God is God for all peoples and faiths, even when our faiths become distracted from the core healing messages of Divinity.
Unfortunately, yes, Swedenborg believed something we all already know a bit about – that we may become so blinded by our selfish, disconnected identities that we can become centered on controlling and dominating others. What he believed were the key motivations that make hell within and often without. We all have these aspects, of course, and so Christ came to teach us how to start to transform these tendencies and to find the strength to carry our circumstances forward toward resurrection.
Another key lesson of Christ and also from the Buddhist masters on our journey toward resurrection, is that in order to uncover that peaceful, open awareness within we must start from a place of compassion for all beings, this includes a growing dedication for their spiritual resurrections as well – just as Christ had. The lessons of Christ: loving thy neighbor and thy enemy, as well as helping the downtrodden and oppressed, are all lessons on centering on compassionate awareness and action. This type of compassion is fundamental to our intrinsic consciousness because it’s intrinsic to God and the purpose of our universe, but we have often layered over this peace-filled state with the crosses we don’t know how to bear.
It’s desperately hard to find compassion for others in a state of fear. Fear about the future, about the present. Fear about our identity, what others think, getting our way, our bodies. What can be key to unlocking the shackle of fear is coming to truly see that everything about it is false, and that its roots in our self-identity and selfishness are false as well. The intrinsic awareness closest to the light of awareness from God is all-pervasive and all-embracing, while still uplifting health and growth – much like the earthly sun with earthly life. This spiritual energy is at the root of all energy and all consciousness and is part of what makes us all one in God. The separation and supremacy of self are a delusion, and selfish thought is the chaotic, suffocating, cloudy transient offspring of these delusions. Although meant to, it doesn’t serve us, but instead blots out the spiritual sun. Although our subjective viewpoint is like a cross, seeming to be at a cross-point in space, we must learn to see beyond it.
The Lord came to enable resurrection with us, in his deeds and glorification process as well as in the messages in his story and spiritual lessons – these transcend historical veracity due to their metaphorical nature, and can still speak to us just as Christ’s parables were always meant to speak to us. We see in Christ an image of what he sought to enable in us, someone willing to carry his cross in the light of compassionate awareness, even unto death through feelings of desperation, disconnection, and being forsaken, abused, and misunderstood.
This carrying of his cross, his fortitude and purity of consciousness empowered by the Divinity within, led to his glorification: his resurrection of both body and spirit into the glory of Divinity. This Resurrecting Spirit now beckons us into the fold, inviting us to follow him carrying our crosses. He invites us to drop the delusions of supremacy and separateness, and to treat others with compassion and love as ourselves. Indeed, although we may overidentify with our minds and bodies, as we become aware that we actually observe these two things (which helps reorder our thinking mind back into its rightful place as a peaceful tool instead of a ruler) we find that the Lord’s gift of wider awareness is the truer us – and that gift makes us one with all things and able to reorder and carry any cross unto resurrection.
A blessed Easter to you,
Cory