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 back in Jesus’s time meant: condemned to death and is 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 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.
Is being a disciple the same thing as being saved? 24 suggests yes, but they could be people of whom much is given and expected, that this doesn’t apply to everyone to be saved. If not, it could be argued that verse 24 is big justification for wanting to be martyred, which we know from the written history of the early church was an issue, there were people who actually wanted to be martyred, which isn’t healthy.