Luke 9.23-24
What does “pick up your cross” mean? Traditionally the church teaches that carrying your cross meant carrying a burden or making a sacrifice. This has inspired Christians for years to believe daily sacrifice is part of being a Christian, but is that what Jesus meant?
Carrying your cross in Jesus’s time meant: condemned to death and walking towards your death. That ties in with the following verse: “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it”. It’s also up for debate whether the paragraph includes “daily”.
Perhaps what Jesus is saying is “give up your life and follow me”, or be willing to sacrifice yourself. Perhaps he means metaphorically, such as priorities “live for God not yourself”, or literally, that we need to accept the very real fact being a Christian can result in martyrdom, and we need to not let that cause us to give up our faith and the Kingdom of God, because what we’d lose is better than a few more years of life – because no matter what we do life is finite.
Or perhaps another possible lesson from this is simply a reminder that our life is finite and sacrificing who we are is not worth saving our life for, similar to Mel Gibsons speech in Braveheart “if you don’t fight you may live, at least for a while. And when you’re dying in your beds in years to come what would you give to come back here and tell the English they may take our lives but they will not take our freedom” and the princesses comment to the King at the end “see, death comes for us all”. Human’s are built to fear death, but it’s incredible what some will do to avoid death, they will kill, lie, cheat, steal, allow themselves to be enslaved and subjected to torture without fighting back, all to stay alive for a few more years. Because that’s all anyone of us will get from these sacrifices, just a few more years. Death is inevitable, it comes for us all, nothing you do will prevent you from going through it, nothing you do will change that, but what you can control how you live your live, what you do on this Earth for the time you have, so be true to yourself – don’t lose your soul – and live a life that aligns with your values, don’t sacrifice who you are for just a few more years. In my opinion this is the message Jesus is trying to get across, because there’s nothing about personal sacrifice anywhere in that chapter, it is about saving/losing one’s life, not making sacrifices to one’s personal comfort as some kind gift to God. Is there anywhere in the Bible God asks men to do this? The only form this seems to take in the Bible is in the form of fasting, giving up levened bread and not working for 1 day a week (which Jesus describes as a gift to mankind not a sacrifice, and I agree, a day off work once a week is a gift not a sacrifice).