No Pain, No Gain

Whoever would be my disciple must deny himself,

He must take up his cross and follow me. (Matthew 16: 24)

We can use the sports expression “No Pain, No Gain” to reflect on the meaning of pain in our lives and its relation to the cross of Christ.

What does it mean to take up a cross? Does any kind of suffering constitute a cross, or must it be suffering explicitly in the pursuit of the Kingdom of God?

People have interesting interpr

etations of what it means to take up a cross. A thought-provoking take on Jesus’ message was offered in a homily at a Mass I attended some years ago. The priest giving the homily proposed that not all suffering is necessarily a cross, for a cross must be freely chosen. Since Jesus freely chose to carry his cross for us, he argued that only the suffering we deliberately choose to take on can be rightly regarded as a cross. He did not consider illness, for example, or the death of a loved one, or being fired from one’s job to be crosses, since they are not chosen.

The homily got me thinking. My first thought was that I could not remember a single time in my life when I had purposely chosen to suffer, nor was I anticipating doing so any time in the near future. (Suffering had come as a result of some things I had chosen to do, but I did not deliberately choose to suffer.)

My second though was that I did not agree with this interpretation at all.

There is a lot of suffering in our life that we do not choose. Yet once we are suffering, we do have a choice of what to do about it. We can choose to be angry, feel sorry for ourselves, or bemoan the injustice of something terrible happening to good people like ourselves. Or we can choose to embrace the suffering as an opportunity to join ourselves to the sufferings of Christ. The latter is choosing to take up a cross, and it can be done whether the suffering was chosen or not.

I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the Church. Colossians 1:24