The Cross and The Will of God

Today, Monday, September 14th is the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Rather than get into the history of this particular event on the Church calendar, I wanted to offer a brief reflection on the relationship between the cross and the way we understand the will of God.

In the Gospel from yesterday's mass, we hear Jesus say that we must pick up our cross and follow him, and then he goes on to say that if we would save our lives, we must lose them. Mark's Gospel is believed to be directed toward a community living under persecution with the threat of actual martyrdom. Thus, the dramatic and even literal interpretation of these passages is quite confronting. However, I do not believe that the way of Christ and the will of God need to be interpreted solely in these literal terms. In fact, I think it is more helpful on a number of counts to emphasize a metaphorical, even symbolic interpretation.

When Jesus tells us to pick up our cross and walk with it, I hear him saying, "embrace the will of God in your life as I did." This is not to say that God's will in our lives will look identical to his (suffering and dying on a cross, falsely accused by religious and political authorities), but rather, that as we identify and accept God's will, that we take it up in faith, with courage, and full of the belief that we will discover the meaning of our lives by holding on to God's will rather than clinging to the attachments and agendas of our own egos.

How do we know the will of God in our lives? At risk of over simplifying a bit, I do not think we have to go far to discover it. The prophet Micah wrote that the will of God was to "love tenderly, to work for justice, and to walk humbly with our God." The Shema, the teaching at the heart of the Torah, is to "love God with all your heart, all your strength, and all you mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself." I believe it is to live life from moment to moment with awareness of God, self, and neighbor... and to allow God's love to flow through us.

What does this require? Well, this is where suffering is sometimes involved. I believe that as we center our lives around loving service, that we must often identify how our ego would chose otherwise in a given moment, and that we must practice a sort of self-emptying of that ego as a result. I know this is a bit of an over simplification, but let's have a conversation about what that might mean in particular circumstances.

Have a great week!