Foundations of Christian Ethics: The Cross

For many Christians, the significance of the cross of Jesus Christ is that Jesus suffered, so we do not have to suffer.  Jesus died, so we do not have to worry about dying.  Jesus paid the penalty of our sins, so we do not have to worry about repenting from sin and making painful sacrifices in order to do so.  As long as we believe Jesus died on the cross for us, we can then go on living our lives in whatever way will enable us to avoid suffering and to be happy, since God loves us and therefore wants us to be happy.  Such ideas are radically contrary to what the New Testament has to say about the nature of Christian discipleship.

The Cross and Christian Discipleship

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23).  This is the clear teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ about the nature of Christian discipleship: it requires self-denial, a commitment to following the way of Jesus, and a willingness to experience suffering, even death, for the sake of Jesus.  Christians cannot avoid these demands by claiming that they only applied to Jesus’s disciples during His earthly ministry, since Jesus Himself equates baptism into the Church community with becoming one of His disciples (Matt 28:19-20).  

All four Gospels have a dual focus of telling us who Jesus is and what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and both of these center around the cross.  In the Gospel of Mark, when Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus’s immediate response is to tell His disciples that He will soon be rejected by the Jewish leaders and will suffer and die (Mk 8:27-31).  Since this does not line up with Peter’s preconceived notions of what is supposed to happen to the Messiah, Peter rebukes Jesus for saying this (8:32).  In response, Jesus harshly rebukes Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!  You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (8:33).  Immediately following this, Jesus declares that “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it (8:34-35).  Jesus here simultaneously redefines His disciples’ understanding of Messiahship and their understanding of discipleship; being a disciple of crucified Lord entails that one must bear one’s own cross.

Though the common Jewish expectations of the time were that the Messiah would be a military hero, Jesus understood His Messiahship through the figures of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah and the Son of Man of Daniel 7; as the Messiah, Jesus would bring salvation to Israel not by killing its political enemies, but by His sacrificial death on the cross.  Jesus, the beloved Son of God, had to submit to the will of His Heavenly Father and suffer and die on the cross in order to bring salvation to the world.  When Christians, through Christ, become adopted as beloved children of God, this does not mean that God will then protect them from all suffering; rather, it means that they will be called to suffer just as Jesus the Son of God was called to suffer.

The idea that it is necessary to bear one’s own cross in order to be a disciple of Jesus the crucified Lord is a central theme in the New Testament.  Jesus repeatedly told His disciples that they would be hated, persecuted, and killed for His sake (Matt 5:10-12, 44, 10:23, 24:9-10; Mark 13:13; Luke 6:22, 21:12-17; John 15:18-25, 17:14).  When God chose Paul to be His apostle to the Gentiles, He said, “I will show him how much he must suffer for My Name” (Acts 9:16).  Throughout the book of Acts, the foundational model for how to be the Church and to evangelize, we see how Jesus’s followers frequently had to endure persecution, suffering, and even death.  But in spite of this, in fact through this, the word of God spread and flourished, and the Church grew.  

The New Testament epistles reinforce this theme, teaching that Christians are destined to be persecuted and hated by the world (1 Thess 3:1-4, 2 Tim 3:12, 1 John 3:13) and that suffering for the sake of Jesus is a normal part of the Christian life (Phil 1:29; 2 Tim 1:8, 2:3; Heb 10:32-39, 13:11-14; James 5:10-11; 1 Pet 4:12).  Some passages even speak of “sharing” in the sufferings of Christ (Rom 8:17; Phil 3:10; 2 Cor 1:5; 1 Pet 4:13).  Whether we understand this as some kind of mystical participation in the cross of Christ or merely as an imitation of Christ’s sufferings, the basic point is the same: Christians, as members of the body of Christ, must be willing to suffer as Jesus suffered.  Furthermore, this suffering is meaningful because, just as Jesus’s suffering and death brought about salvation for the world, the sufferings of Christians can be the means by which they are saved and by which they show the world who Jesus is, thus “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24).  

Because suffering can be meaningful and redemptive, Christians can, like the apostles in the book of Acts (5:41), rejoice in their sufferings (Rom 5:3; Col 1:24; 1 Pet 4:13).  This does not mean that Christians are masochists; suffering in and of itself is an evil that Christians desire to see eliminated from creation.  But, because of their love for God, Christians can rejoice in suffering for the cause of Christ.  

The Cross and Christian Ethics

So what does all this have to do with ethics?  Conventional worldly wisdom considers suffering and death to be things to be avoided at all costs.  An “ethical” worldly person will be willing to do good to others as far as it is convenient for them to do so.  Perhaps they might even be willing to undergo some significant inconvenience in order to do good to others.  But if doing good to others requires them to suffer deeply, they will consider themselves justified in refusing to do so.  They will consider it their “right” to stand up for themselves and to do whatever will enable them to avoid suffering and death, even if it means that others will suffer harm.  They will consider hating and killing their enemies the morally right thing to do if that is what it takes to avoid suffering and death for themselves and their loved ones.

Christians, on the other hand, have a radically different ethic based on their radically different attitude toward suffering.  Christians know that genuine ethics means being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, the crucified One.  Therefore, acting ethically means that Christians will sometimes be required to suffer, or even die, in order to be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ.  As the apostle Peter writes, “If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God.  To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in His steps. . . Since Christ suffered in His body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with sin” (1 Pet 2:20-21, 4:1).  A willingness to suffer lies at the core of Christian ethics.

While Christians do not desire suffering for its own sake, neither do they see it as an evil to be avoided at all costs.  Christians will be willing to embrace suffering for the sake of being obedient to God and showing His love to the world.  From the world’s perspective, Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies is nothing short of madness.  But from the perspective of Christian ethics, a willingness to respond to persecution with blessing, to hate with love, to violence with peace, is the only rational course of action.  

In its teachings about suffering, the New Testament mostly focuses on external suffering brought about by the world’s persecution.  However, it is also the case that Christians must be willing to suffer internally, as they struggle with temptation and sin.  As renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright puts it, “The gospel Jesus announced was not about getting in touch with your deepest feelings or accepting yourself as you really are.  It was about taking up your cross and following him.  That is tough, and it doesn’t stop being tough when you’ve done it for a year, or a decade, or a lifetime.  The victory won through suffering on the cross is implemented, here as elsewhere, through the suffering of Jesus’s followers, most of whom will continue to be troubled from time to time by temptation in relation to money and sex and many other things beside.”^[1]The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), page 398.  While the world says that a person is justified in sinning if that is what allows them to avoid psychological suffering, such an idea is radically contrary to Christian ethics.

When doing the right thing means having to suffer deeply, Christians cannot claim that they therefore have a “right” to set aside God’s ethical demands.  Rather, they will refuse to compromise and will choose to do the right thing.  Following Jesus on the way of the cross, they can rejoice in the fact that in doing so share in the sufferings of Christ.

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