Obedience, the Cross, and Liberation

Paul says that Jesus was obedient suffering on the cross even unto death. Obviously I have been thinking about this a lot all of lent. As Religious, obedience sometimes encourages us to take up crosses we would never choose for ourselves. There is a value simply in that act alone. Jesus never said “pick up your dandelion and follow me” or “pick up your remote control” or “your Playstation 2” it was something hard, something brutal, it was to pick up the cross. I realize now that obedience to the will of God, for religious but also for everyone else committed to living Christian life, particularly when it is obedience to do something which, like Christ, we want to cry out to the father saying “remove this cup from me!” is not only obedience for the sake of doing God’s will, but it is the imitation of Christ in its very heart, sacrificial, and a real surrender (not simply resignation) to the love of God.

This life is hard some times, let no one convince you otherwise. It is immeasurably worth it though, and not in the sense that the world thinks of worth either. Living a life of Christian discipleship is living the life which makes us most fully alive, and that is what it is doing for me.

The people of El Salvador have been in my mind and on my heart lately too. Maybe it is because I am working on a paper using Salvadoran philosophers. But it strikes me that they have helped to teach me this lesson in their joy and generosity in the midst of the suffering they still wrongly endure. The mystery of the Cross teaches us that obedience to the will of God is about imitating Christ, even to the end. That imitation of Christ necessarily has to include being with the people Christ first came to, the poor. Proclaiming good news to them, as Christ did, proclaiming their dignity, their value, their liberation. Taking up the cross means standing with those members of the Church, which just is the body of Christ, who are crucified, and asking along with Ignatius meditating on the crucifixion.. what have I done for Christ, what am I doing for Christ, what will I do for Christ?