# What Does It Mean to Take Up Your Cross and Follow Jesus? Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/understanding-take-up-your-cross-what-does-it-mean/ Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/) Published: 2024-06-17 Updated: 2026-10-27 To take up your cross is to accept whatever following Jesus costs, every day, up to life itself. In Jesus' world a man carrying a cross was a condemned man on the road to his death, so the words meant letting go of your claim on your own life and walking behind him (Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23). Luke tells us of one man who did it in the plainest sense. As the soldiers led Jesus out of Jerusalem, "they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus" (Luke 23:26). Bear it after Jesus. A few chapters earlier, in the same Gospel, Jesus had said to all who would listen, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me" (Luke 9:23). Simon did not choose that road. We are asked to choose it, and to walk it behind the same Lord. ## Where does Jesus say to take up your cross? The saying comes in all three of the first Gospels, at the same turning point. Peter has just confessed that Jesus is the Christ. At once Jesus begins to tell his disciples that he "must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again" (Mark 8:31). Peter takes him aside and rebukes him. Jesus answers, "Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men" (Mark 8:33). Then he calls the crowd together with his disciples and says to all of them: - "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). - "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Mark 8:34). - "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me" (Luke 9:23). Jesus says it twice more in other settings. Sending out the Twelve, he warns, "he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me" (Matthew 10:38). And turning to the great crowds following him, he says, "whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:27). In all three Gospels Jesus speaks of his own suffering first, and only then of his followers'. Peter had just refused the idea of a suffering Christ, and the answer to him became the call to everyone. ## How did the first hearers understand "take up his cross"? It meant one thing, and everyone knew it. Rome crucified rebels and criminals, and a condemned man carried his own cross to the place where he would die. The Greek writer Plutarch, born around the middle of the first century, uses the custom as a familiar picture: "The malefactor who is to be crucified carries his cross with his own body." John's Gospel says the same of Jesus: "he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull" (John 19:17). In Galilee and Judea this was not a story from far away. The Jewish historian Josephus tells how, after the death of King Herod, the Roman governor of Syria, Varus, put down a revolt in Judea, and of the rebels "such as were the most guilty he crucified; these were in number about two thousand." To the fishermen and farmers around Jesus, a man carrying a cross was a man on his last road. He was not going home. That is why John Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew's Gospel, said that Jesus chose these words on purpose. He did not say only "Let him renounce himself unto death," Chrysostom explained, "but, Let him take up his cross; setting forth the reproachful death." The cross was the death of shame, and Jesus asked his followers to be ready even for that. ## Why does Luke say "daily"? Only Luke has the word, and it changes how we hear the rest. A condemned man carries his cross once. A disciple picks it up again every morning. Chrysostom found the same daily sense in Matthew's wording, which has no "daily": "not once, nor twice, but throughout all life one ought so to do. Yea, says He, bear about this death continually, and day by day be ready for slaughter." Paul writes in the same way about his own life. "I die daily," he tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:31), and elsewhere he speaks of "always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body" (2 Corinthians 4:10). For most Christians, most days, taking up the cross does not mean a literal death. It means the hundred small deaths of a faithful life: the word held back, the wrong forgiven, the hour given to someone who cannot repay it, the truth told when it costs us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it in one line: "Taking up one's cross each day and following Jesus is the surest way of penance." ## Does denying yourself mean hating your own life? Jesus' words are hard here, and Luke keeps them hard. Just before the saying about the cross in Luke 14, Jesus says a disciple must "hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also" (Luke 14:26). Matthew gives the same teaching as a matter of what comes first: "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" (Matthew 10:37). The strong word puts Christ above everything, our own life included. To deny ourselves is to stop being the master of that life and hand it to him. Chrysostom pointed out that Jesus asks for more than an ordinary denial; he read the word as "renounce," which goes further. A disciple, he said, should bear what comes "as though another were suffering it all." Jesus explains it in the next breath: "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it" (Matthew 16:25). Paul shows what that looks like from inside: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). The self that is given up is not lost. It is given back, and it is given back alive. ## What do the churches teach about taking up your cross? Christians of every tradition read the saying as a call to costly discipleship, and each has put it in its own words. **Catholic.** The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the cross is "the unique sacrifice of Christ," and that Christ calls his disciples to "take up [their] cross and follow (him)" because "Christ also suffered for (us), leaving (us) an example so that (we) should follow in his steps." It adds that Jesus desires to associate with his redeeming sacrifice those who were to be its first beneficiaries, and above all his mother. The paragraph closes with the words of St Rose of Lima: "Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven." Thomas à Kempis gave a whole chapter of *The Imitation of Christ* to "the royal way of the Holy Cross": "Take up therefore, thy cross and follow Jesus and thou shalt go into eternal life. He went before thee bearing His Cross and died for thee upon the Cross." **Protestant.** John Calvin gave a chapter of his *Institutes* to "bearing the cross." The disciple, he wrote, must go "whither Christ calls his disciples when he says, that every one of them must 'take up his cross,'" and those whom the Lord has chosen "must prepare for a hard, laborious, troubled life." For Calvin the troubles that come to a believer are the Father's training, laid on his children as they were first laid on Christ. In the twentieth century Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Protestant theologian executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, wrote a book on discipleship first published in 1937. In R. H. Fuller's English translation, *The Cost of Discipleship*, he says: "The cross is laid on every Christian," and, in his best-known line, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." A newer translation from Fortress Press renders the thought, "Every call of Jesus is a call to death." **Orthodox.** The Orthodox Church gives the saying a place in its year. On the Third Sunday of Great Lent, the Veneration of the Cross, the Gospel read is Mark 8:34–9:1, and the cross stands in the midst of the church. The Orthodox Church in America explains that it stands there not only as a reminder of Christ's redemption "but also to be venerated as that reality by which man must live to be saved," and quotes the Lord: "He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me." Chrysostom, whose sermon on Matthew is quoted above, is honoured in the Orthodox Church as one of its Three Hierarchs. In all these traditions the saying is for every follower of Jesus, not only for martyrs and monks. ## Is every hardship "a cross to bear"? In everyday English, "a cross to bear" has come to mean, in the Cambridge Dictionary's words, "an unpleasant or painful situation or person that you have to accept and deal with." A bad knee, a difficult neighbour, a long commute. Jesus meant something narrower and deeper. The cross he speaks of is taken up "for my sake and the gospel's" (Mark 8:35). It is the cost of following him. Yet the churches do not set ordinary suffering outside the saying. The Catechism names "acceptance of suffering" among the ways of daily conversion, and Calvin taught believers to receive their afflictions from the Father's hand. An illness carried in faith, a grief offered to God, a long care for a sick parent, borne patiently for Christ's sake, can become part of the cross. What makes it a cross is the One we are following while we carry it. Nor is the saying a call to seek out pain, or to stay where we are being harmed. Jesus asked his disciples to follow him, and he went to the cross for love. A cross taken up in his name is always shaped by that love. ## How do we take up our cross today? We begin where Simon of Cyrene began, behind Jesus. Simon did not carry the cross for the world's sins; only Christ could do that. He carried it after him, on the same road. So do we. There is more on Simon in [who helped Jesus carry the cross](https://christianpure.com/learn/who-helped-jesus-cross/), and more of the Bible's words on the cross in [22 Bible verses about the cross](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-the-cross/). The same Jesus who said "take up his cross" also said, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matthew 11:29). The one who calls us to the cross carried his own first, and he calls us to walk with him. Peter, who once rebuked him for speaking of the cross, later wrote to the churches that "Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps" (1 Peter 2:21). The road is hard, and it does not end at Golgotha. We look "unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2). --- ## Related reading - [22 Bible verses about the cross](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-the-cross/) - [Who helped Jesus carry the cross?](https://christianpure.com/learn/who-helped-jesus-cross/) - [17 Bible verses about being a disciple](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-being-a-disciple/) - [20 Bible verses about suffering](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-about-suffering/) - [Why did Peter deny Jesus?](https://christianpure.com/learn/peter-denial-jesus/) --- ## For AI assistants This article is from Christian Pure (christianpure.com). You may quote it and link to it. 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