A Path of Bold Resistance

“If someone wants to follow after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

~ Mark 8:34b (my translation)

Among wounding scriptures, this one ranks pretty high. It has been used time and again in Christian communities to encourage people to suppress who they are in order to become who God wants them to be. It has been wielded to mold people into subservience to violent, dominating powers as the ideal posture for Christian life. It has been manipulated to convince people to endure abuse and suffering without protest in order to be faithful followers of Jesus. It has produced victimizing and bystander theologies that cannot embrace embodied human life as a God-given good or acknowledge unjust social orders in their midst.

But the assumptions driving these conclusions about Jesus’s words here in Mark 8:34 have no basis in the gospel narrative. What Jesus says undermines every single one.

Jesus’s words have nothing to do with denying who you are, swapping selfish for selfless behavior, ignoring personal safety or well-being, or hating yourself. Jesus is not putting his finger on a widespread cultural problem of obsession with the individual self in first-century Palestine. When he says “deny themselves,” he is not expecting readers to filter his words through modern American individualism and turn Christian discipleship into a quest to conquer one’s personal desires, limits, or pride.

Nor is Jesus glorifying suffering, powerlessness, or subservience. He is not invoking a cross because everyone around him would hear that word as a metaphor for some personally painful situation. He is not teaching people to put up with being abused or harmed, to seek out death, or to sit and do nothing while violent, unjust powers crush communities. “Take up their cross” is not Jesus’s code for “be passive, submissive, compliant, and quiet, no matter what.”

His message? Liberation struggle. And not an otherworldly kind.

Context matters for reckoning with this verse. Just before Jesus utters these words in Mark, he is in the middle of a conversation with his disciples about what other people are saying about him. The question of who Jesus is surfaces again. This time, his prophetic image merges with the crucial identity of Messiah, one divinely anointed to liberate God’s people, not just to relay a message of coming liberation.

Jesus then molds this identity further by explaining how he anticipates opposition that will lead to his execution. Peter—and, let’s be honest, probably the other disciples too—doesn’t know how to accept what Jesus is saying. He tries to stop Jesus from spouting such ideas, only to be silenced by Jesus.

It is into this moment that Jesus says, “If someone wants to follow after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Whatever Jesus means with “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” is inseparable from the question of who Jesus is. And to none at this point in the story is his identity clear. No one around him understands that he expects the path he taking to end in death. He senses the conflict. He sees no way that he will make it out alive. The systems that he has struggled against are bound to come down on him. Powerful people and empires don’t tolerate resisters for long. They are experts in retaliation.

The word that ultimately gives away his identity is “cross.” This is the first time in the gospel of Mark where the word “cross” appears. Jesus isn’t specific about the type of death he anticipates until this moment. When he says “cross,” the full scope and stakes of his mission thunder through the scene.

Christian tradition has fixated on the cross of Jesus as a salvific theological symbol to the point that its original historical meaning is often obfuscated. But those living under Roman imperial occupation understood the political dimensions of this instrument of execution. As New Testament scholar Joel Marcus shows, crucifixion was a strategy to humiliate and shame “rebellious slaves,” resisters, and those who refused to stay in their place and acquiesce to the empire. It was like a perverse “punishment [to] fit the crime” of rising up and challenging imperial power. Crucifixion was designed not only to torture and kill but also to make a public example of such figures for any who would try to do likewise. [1] The cross in first-century Palestine was a symbol of Roman domination, violence, and control.

Invoking a cross rather than another mode of execution suggests that Jesus understands himself to be engaged in a challenge to imperial power. His path is headed toward posing enough resistance that imperial officials would see fit to put an end to such rebellion once and for all. Jesus is not casting himself as meek, subservient, or selfless. He is boldly refusing to stay in his place of subservience. His is a mission aimed at standing up, speaking up, and raising hell in the face of a violent, oppressive political order.

And he invites his followers to do the same: If someone wants to follow me, let them follow me.

This is not a call to “come and die,” as Bonhoeffer is often attributed with saying. [2] Welcoming death is not the point of Jesus’s words. I do not think Jesus is asking those who would follow him to try to redeem the cross or bow to its ideology, as if the Roman symbol told any truth about their lives that they should internalize. His call is toward liberation from the lies that this symbol of oppression tells. His call is to join him in resisting imperial power and rising up against oppression. He is saying, You do not have to stay in the place that these dominating powers have ordered you to occupy. We are free to get up and stand against them together. We can resist them for the sake of the marginalized, suffering people around us because the kingdom of God belongs to these—not Caesar.

The mission is not without risk. But not getting involved is a choice weighted with its own dangers. People will continue to suffer if the oppressive social, economic, and political order proceeds as usual. Life, livelihood, and liberation could be at stake for generations. Unjust systems of domination may force human beings into soul-shredding decisions that no human being should have to bear between surviving and staying true to themselves and their values.

Which brings me back to Jesus’s initial words: “let them deny themselves.” If “take up their cross” points to disrupting the Roman imperial order, then denying themselves has to be about disruption, not self-abnegation, for those who would follow Jesus. The only kind of denial that makes sense here is a decision to stop what they’re doing, to stop going along with the unjust status quo, and to participate in Jesus’s resistance effort. “Deny themselves” means saying “enough is enough” to the systems of oppression that have constrained their own lives as well as the lives of numerous people near and far. It involves refusing to submit to powers that run counter to God’s kingdom and power. It calls for boldness, courage, and expansive hope for God “to do a new thing” (Isa 43:19)—say, raising the executed (Mk 8:31).

When following Jesus means resisting imperial power, that also entails resisting picking up imperial “tools,” to use Audre Lorde’s metaphor, that do violence and injustice in order to fight for liberation. [3] Jesus reveals an alternative path to staying in disempowering subjugation, to bystanding in silence, and to assuming a position of domination. And that revelation is good news for two reasons:

1) It frees followers to use liberation’s tools in the struggle for liberation rather than giving oppression another foothold in their lives before they have even begun to fight.

2) It means that all people, in any position in the social and political structure, can participate in the liberation that Jesus is after. No one is excluded from following him in this resistance work.

Ultimately, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” is like a photographic negative or shadow for the shape of Jesus’s liberation struggle. The final image looks not like death but life. It depicts people gathering and working together to build a shared social, economic, and political life that prioritizes the flourishing of those who have been silenced (9:17, 10:48), those who have been harmed by oppressive forces (9:22), those who are most vulnerable and overlooked (9:36–37), those who have been economically disenfranchised through inequitable social structures tied to patriarchal and ableist norms (10:2–12, 46), and those who have been impoverished (10:21). This is the path that Jesus walks with his followers. Resistance starts and ends here.

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Notes and References

A piece on Mark 8:27-38, one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sunday, September 12, 2021

My comments here are indebted to the insights of James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2011) and of M. Shawn Copeland in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Fortress, 2010). Their books underscore the theological significance of oppressed persons and groups resisting domination as well as the social significance of God’s solidarity with oppressed persons and groups in Jesus with particular attention to African Americans’ resistance against the violent domination that white supremacy has inflicted through enslavement, segregation, and lynching. Their work has helped me better perceive the social and political dynamics of Jesus’s ministry in the gospels and their implications for Christians living amid structural racial injustice in the U.S.

Another important work that has influenced my thinking on how to understand Jesus’s crucifixion is Elisabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza’s review of various feminist, womanist, and liberationist interpretations of the cross in Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (Continuum, 1995), pp. 97-128. She highlights the array of critiques that women have leveled against patriarchal ideologies and politics undergirding normative Christian understandings of the cross, which have propped up or enabled valorization of suffering, abuse, and disempowerment of women and children. Their critiques expose the problems with casting Christian discipleship as a call to self-abnegation or suffering.

[1] Joel Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 1 (Spr 2006): 73-87, p. 78. The second quotation is quoted in the article from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Mikado on p. 80.

[2] A footnote in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works edition of Discipleship explains: “In the earlier English version of The Cost of Discipleship, Fuller translated this famous aphorism as ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’ The austere German text reads: ‘Jeder Ruf Christi fuehrt in den Tod.’ Literally, that says, ‘Every call of Christ leads into death.'” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, eds. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4 (Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 87.

[3] I’m referring to her famous statement in the title of the following essay: Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 2nd ed. (Kitchen Table, 1983), 98-101.

Image of “Cross” is by Felix Besombes on the Unsplash website