Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me (Mark 8:34–9:1)
Gerald Largent
Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me
Mark 8:34–9:1
In the Gospel appointed for the Sunday after the Elevation of the Holy Cross, our Lord Jesus Christ speaks words that go directly to the heart of Christian discipleship: “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” These words leave little room for a Christianity of convenience. Christ does not simply invite us to admire Him, agree with His teachings, or turn to Him only when life becomes difficult. He calls us to follow Him—and the path He walks leads through the Cross to the Resurrection.
To deny ourselves does not mean despising the person God created us to be. Rather, it means turning away from the false self shaped by pride, selfish desire, resentment, fear, and the constant demand to have our own way. Sin teaches us to place ourselves at the center of everything. Christ calls us instead to place God at the center. In this sense, self-denial is not the destruction of the person but the healing of the person. We surrender the life ruled by the passions so that the true life given to us in Christ may emerge.
Then comes the command to “take up” our cross. The Cross is not merely an ornament that we wear, nor only an historical event that we remember. The Orthodox Church teaches that the Cross must become part of the very content of the Christian life. We encounter it whenever obedience to Christ costs us something: when we forgive instead of retaliating, when we repent instead of defending ourselves, when we remain faithful in suffering, when we sacrifice for another person, when we resist temptation, or when we choose truth even though doing so is difficult.
Yet Christianity is not a religion that glorifies suffering for its own sake. The Cross is precious because it is the Cross of Christ. United to Him, suffering can become a path toward resurrection. The Church therefore does not look upon the Cross as a sign of defeat, but as the weapon of victory. What appeared to the world as humiliation became the means by which death itself was defeated.
Christ continues with a paradox: whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Christ and the Gospel will save it. The world tells us that life is found through security, possessions, recognition, comfort, and control. The Gospel tells us that life is found by giving ourselves away in love. A person may “gain the whole world” and still discover that the soul has become empty.
This question of Christ—“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”—asks us to examine what we are pursuing. What receives our greatest attention? What governs our choices? What are we unwilling to surrender? The answer reveals much about where our treasure lies.
Finally, the Lord warns us not to be ashamed of Him. Christian discipleship is not meant to disappear when faith becomes unpopular or inconvenient. We confess Christ not only with words but through patience, mercy, courage, repentance, generosity, chastity, faithfulness, and love.
The Cross therefore stands before us as both judgment and invitation. It exposes the emptiness of living only for ourselves, but it also shows us the road to freedom. Christ does not command us to carry a cross while He watches from afar. He has already carried the Cross before us. He walks with us still, transforming sacrifice into love, suffering into hope, and death itself into the doorway of resurrection.
To follow Christ is to entrust our entire life to Him. And when we do, we discover the great mystery of the Gospel: in losing our life for Christ, we finally receive life as God intended it to be.
From the St. Panteleimon Orthodox Christian Outreach bulletin for September 20, 2026.