Today, on the third Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the veneration of the Holy Cross, we listen to Saint Mark’s Gospel and hear Jesus Christ’s challenging words about what it means to be His followers. He calls us to renounce ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him, and warns us that if we seek to save our lives we will surely lose them.
These are disturbing words and remind us of the great cost involved in being a Christian. Too often we can domesticate what it means to bear our cross, forgetting that, for Christ, the Cross was something that cost Him His life. And He reminds us in this Gospel that, if we are to be His followers, it will also cost us our life.
We might wonder at this. Is not our life a gift from God, and does He not desire that we should live it to the full? Why should He expect us to renounce life? Does God really want us to be miserable? Jesus gives us a clue to this paradox by telling us that “whoever loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.”
Jesus Christ came to bring us abundant life and to restore to life those who are in the tombs, as we will sing at Pascha. But in order for us to receive this gift of life we need to die to all of our tendencies to sin, to renounce our own selfishness and the many ways it has infiltrated our lives, and to open ourselves to genuinely following Christ. What this involves will be different for each one of us, but we know that there is no true life which does not involve dying to ourselves. And we know too that, in doing so, we receive the only life that is truly worth living.