Based on a chapter of the same name in Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’ s book “Colti da Stupore – incontri con Gesù” [Struck by Astonishment – meetings with Jesus.] Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano, 2012
All biblical quotations are from ‘The Jerusalem Bible’, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966.
He called the people and his disciples to him and said, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up the cross and follow me.
Mark 8, 34-38.
These words by Jesus leave us nearly breathless. They are extremely demanding, and we appear unprepared for them. They are words that do not leave us a way out, no escape route.
We can imagine that they were uttered during a particularly polemical situation, in which Jesus faces an “adulterous and sinful generation”, or that Jesus was in a bad mood.
However, even in the other gospels one can find words like these. For example, “Anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me”. (Mt 10,38). Or “None of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.” (Lk 14,33). Or “I tell you, most solemnly, unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies it remains only a single grain.” (Jn 12,24). The fact that the gospels of Matthew and Luke proclaim that the kingdom of God is for the poor and that Luke also adds “Alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now.” (Lk 6,24) only serve to add to the discomfort produced by these words. To make matters worse, we, for the most part, do not feel for others and we are not poor. Even the priests and the monks, who in theory have left all possessions, in practice have the support of many. That is, we are very far from the condition where one has nobody to give him his daily needs and in which one is totally deprived of the respect and esteem each one of us needs to live.
When faced with these kinds of words, which are very common in the gospels, one can adopt one of three stances.
Firstly, one can just ignore them. One can surmise that these words are based on a distorted vision of life and express a voluptas mortis – a pleasure of death, which goes against common sense. Discussing the hard sayings of Jesus, Richard Rohr*, says that these “are written off as metaphors and literary exaggerations and ignored.”
A second stance could be to take these words more seriously but then behave like the student faced with the teacher of Maths that declares his subject to be the most important of all, a claim made also by the English teacher, by the French teacher and by the Physics teacher. One thinks that a religious person will obviously think that religion should be the number one priority in life and that other things will have to take a secondary place.
But Jesus is not just a common religious person. He is the one who comes to guide each person towards his real destiny. There are therefore some, a few, – the third stance – that take these words very seriously and heroically push themselves to live them. However, even these are not fully correct as they hide their wealth under a cover of make-believe poverty. Rohr* states that, “We have fabricated a grid to screen anything troublesome from our consciences. …… Thus, we let in certain information and exclude unnecessary or bothersome information, things that we can’t deal with. Our grid has kept out an awful lot of the Gospel for that reason.”
It would be better that when we are confronted by these Jesus words’, we merely accept that we are all somewhat wealthy and that we need His infinite mercy to continue to rely on him.
As the parable of the pharisee and the publican says, it was not the one that said to God “I thank you Lord for I am not like other men”, who went home in peace, but the one who prayed “Lord, have a mercy on me, a poor sinner.”
Then we will experience the truth in Jesus’ words “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The disciples were astonished by these words: “Who can be saved, then?” Jesus looked at them and said: “For men”, he told them, “this is impossible: for God everything is possible.” (Mt 19, 24-26)
*Rohr, Richard (2013) Job and the Mystery of Suffering. Spiritual Reflections. USA. The Crossroad Publishing Company.