I want to protest. There must be another way, an easier way, a way that doesn’t involve as much suffering

Today is Good Friday.

It is the day we are reminded that the Christian faith stands in direct opposition to what the world counts as success. Our faith calls us to a life that is produced by death.

This morning our little church went on the twelve step journey of the stations of the cross. It was a sobering path that confronted me again with the sheer violence of the event that is at the heart of all we are about.

When Jesus invites us to take up our crosses, he is inviting us to a confronting, counter-cultural life.

N.T. Wright puts it well in his book The Challenge of Jesus:

“If we are to be Kingdom-announcers, modeling the new way of being human, we are also to be crossbearers. This is a strange and dark theme that is also our birthright as followers of Jesus. Shaping our world is never for a Christian a matter of going out arrogantly thinking we can just get on with the job, reorganizing the world according to some model that we have in mind. It is a matter of sharing and bearing the pain and puzzlement of the world so that the crucified love of God in Christ may be brought to bear healingly upon the world at exactly that point. Because Jesus bore the cross uniquely for us, we do not have to purchase forgiveness again; it’s been done. But because, as he himself said, following him involves taking up the cross, we should expect, as the New Testament tells us repeatedly, that to build on his foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life and work over and over again.”

Death produces life.

Everything in me wants to protest that there must be another way, an easier way, a way that doesn’t involve as much suffering.

This, however, is the life to which we are called.