The story is told of a woman who lived a long and busy life. But feeling she had carried too heavy a cross, she managed to gain admittance to a heavenly warehouse of crosses she could exchange for more suitable ones. An angel guided her as she wandered through the aisles, finding some crosses too light and showy, others too heavy. Having to decide before the warehouse closed, she finally chose a cross near the exit – heavy enough to be a cross, but one she could handle. Then the angel burst out, “Lady, that’s the cross you came in with.”
We certainly will go to any length to avoid carrying our cross! But why should the sinless Jesus insist so strongly on carrying his cross and underline its inevitability so constantly for his disciples? Jesus himself had to endure suffering and death before rising from the dead. He will repeat the experience of rejection and suffering of Old Testament prophets like Isaiah.
Many answers have been proposed for Jesus’s suffering, but one seems to explain more than others. Since during his passion, Jesus was the victim of profound injustice and violence – corrupt court proceedings, humiliation, physical violence, and a cruel death – he had to confront these evils head-on in order to defang them and “drain” them of their evil. He had to meet them directly and conquer them by experiencing them. Such a “confrontational” interpretation finds support in an odd phrase in the Apostles Creed “[Christ] descended into hell.” Tradition understands the phrase as the risen Christ descending into “hell,” a level of existence that was neither heaven or hell in an ultimate sense, but a place or state where the souls of pre-Christian people waited for the message of the gospel. The risen Christ had to meet or “touch” them personally in order to heal their exclusion and bring them into his circle. This ancient creed supports the interpretation that Christ must face down evil. Christ is therefore the one who has courageously faced the full force of evil and forced it to retreat before his power and life, which he shares with his loyal followers.
As William Grimm, an American Maryknoll priest in Japan, writes, “Christ’s call for us to take up the cross is an invitation to learn that though suffering is always with us and may make us think God is far from us, it is actually a share in the life of God who also takes up the cross.”