Pick Up Your Cross

Do you remember the final scene in the movie Spartacus? Spartacus and his army of slaves seeking freedom have been defeated by the Romans. Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), his friend Antoninus (Tony Curtis), and thousands of his followers have been captured. The Romans crucify them all, along a Roman road, mile after mile, crosses on both sides of the road, thousands of them.



That’s what the Romans did with rebels against their power. Jesus wasn’t the first, or the last.

Today, we hardly ever think of a crucifixion except the crucifixion of Jesus. We capitalize it: "The Crucifixion". But we miss part of the message of "The Crucifixion" if we forget all the other crucifixions. In Judea and Galilee, off at the edge of the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a constant threat. The Jews didn’t rest easily under the rule of Rome, the rule of pagans, the rule of idolaters, the rule of those who denied the One True God, Creator of the Universe. There were rebels, patriots, zealots ready to take arms against their pagan masters. And the pagan masters had crosses ready for them if, and when, they did.

We read in the Gospels that Jesus said , “Pick up your cross and follow me,” and we think: He’s calling on us to be good Christians. No: He was telling his followers that he was going to die, die a terrible, painful, and despicable death, and if they followed him, they probably were going to die, too, die a terrible, painful, and despicable death. And many of them did. They were crucified, thrown from the city walls, stoned. Paul was lucky; as a Roman citizen he was spared crucifixion – they beheaded him instead.

It’s so easy being a Christian in most places in the world today. The worst thing they do to us is laugh at us, mock us, and call us unsophisticated rubes. It’s different in some places, in China, in Darfur, in North Korea, in parts of Nigeria, but for most of us, being Christian is easy.

So Holy Week is a good time for us to remind ourselves of where our faith came from. That it grew and took root in a time and in places where persecution and death – even death on a cross — were a constant reality. We owe it to those who came before us to take our faith as seriously in easy times as they took it in hard times.

By Eric Von Salzen