The Cross in the Marketplace

This article has been simultaneously published at IMT.  

“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’” (Matthew 16:24)

Martin Luther said that there is a cross to be taken up in the marketplace.[1] But he was not the first to say this. Jesus was. Indeed in Luke 9:23 he said that we are to take up our cross “daily.” And where are we most days of the week? And what do we suffer when we exercise the moral courage to confront an unethical treatment of employees or address the fact that someone is unremunerated for overtime or forced into unsafe working conditions, especially when this intervention could result in mistrust by our own supervisors or the loss of our position?

In Matthew 16:24 Jesus says—radically, disturbingly, hauntingly: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” I have brooded over this text for almost my entire life, certainly from 18 years of age to the present—seventy years in all.

What can it mean?

Denying oneself is surely clear and deeply challenging but not easy. Not just denying ourselves something such as what we may have done through lent, like denying ourselves a luxury. But denying ourselves, our self-life, our self-orientation. Jesus calls this “losing your life for me” and he says we will find it again with him. That is the great mystery of participation in Christ: I in Christ; Christ in me. “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). But taking up our cross, what does that mean? And all this to follow Jesus. And to follow him into the marketplace.

Whenever we take communion, we enter into and participate in the work of Jesus on the cross; we re-member it, in the sense of bringing the past into the present. And similarly we re-member the resurrection that followed. But we cannot actually take up the cross of Jesus. Not even Simon who carried the crossbeam on the Via Dolorosa could do it. Why?

I have been reading my favorite theologian P.T. Forsyth in his tiny book The Cruciality of the Cross printed in the early twentieth century.[2] It is devastating and revelatory of the meaning of the death of Jesus. Of course, Jesus forgave people of their sins against God and others in his public ministry without needing to go to the cross. And Jesus was charged with blasphemy for doing it. So, was the cross actually necessary? Why did Jesus so repeatedly say that he came to give his life as a ransom for many?

Here is why: Christ came to redeem, to make an atonement (at-one-ment) between God and humankind. To do that racially (for the entire human race) and eternally he had to identify with all humanity; in a word, he needed to become a human being. He had to go through a complete human experience from conception to resurrection. In the Hebrew Bible the goel, the redeemer, was the next of kin who could redeem a person from slavery, redeem their mortgaged property or, as Boaz did with Ruth, redeem a widow by giving her a family. So, when Job cries out, “I know my redeemer lives” (Job 19:25) he was prophetically saying he has a next of kin in heaven.

Indeed. Jesus came and died to express in a fully human life, but an entirely sinless one, at a moment in history, what God had been doing through human history through the “Lamb slain from the creation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). He came not merely to show the love of God but to exhibit the holiness of God in one critical, crucial act of redemption, release, reconciliation and atonement. Let me outline what Christ did in his death drawing on P.T. Forsyth’s insightful comments.

1. Christ came to die and to ransom humankind.

He did not come just to show us that God loved us. He knew from the beginning he was to be the suffering servant of Isaiah 52–53. “The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all” (53:6). The temptations he encountered at the beginning of his ministry were alternatives to the cross. Jesus put it this way: “Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:23).

2. Christ volunteered his life to make humankind right with God.

In John 10: 17–18 Jesus said, “The reason the Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”

It would not be the same if Jesus had died in a chariot accident or through disease. His death could have been through some other violent means than the cross, but it needed to be a demonstration of sin. It was not a homicide, a suicide, or a martyrdom (no one takes my life from me). “I lay it down of my own accord,” he said. His death was a self-sacrifice.

This is why in Holy Week, the week consummated with his resurrection, Jesus was almost totally in charge of all the events, arranging and orchestrating the circumstances of his own death, and in the death itself, voluntarily giving up his own spirit.

His will was to die for us. That is apparent from the tender scene in the Garden of Gethsemane the night he was arrested. He three times prayed about the forthcoming cross. In the first two he said, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” But in the third prayer he said, “Father if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done” (Matt. 26:42). I take this to be not mere compliance, which is a psychological adaptation to pain, not merely going along with the will of the Father but wholehearted, true submission to the will of the Father.

3. His shed blood saves us not by virtue of the amount of blood but by the self-giving of his central will in obedience to the holy Father.

Possibly the key verse in the Bible on the effectiveness of sacrifice is in Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make an atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement [by the life in the blood].” If it were Jesus’ blood that saves us, then not a drop of it must be left in his body. But blood stands for the outpoured life, the full and total investment of Christ’s holy self. It was a self-sacrifice.

Forsyth writes, “Sacrifice is the result of God’s grace and not its cause…. The real ground of any atonement is not in God’s wrath but God’s grace. There can be no talk of propitiation in the sense of mollification, or of purchasing God’s grace, in any religion founded on the Bible” (89). And again, “The blood as life means the central will, the self-will, the whole will, in loving oblation. This is the sacrifice even in God. The cross does not in the New Testament exhibit God as accepting sacrifice so much as making it” (92, emphasis mine).

4. Jesus was not punished by God for mankind’s sin, but God in Christ took punishment in himself; it was God’s self-expiation for sin.

So, in 2 Corinthians 5:19 Paul affirms, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.” God in Jesus became forsaken on the cross because God was man-forsaken. Taking the words of Psalm 22 on his own lips Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:1). Jesus went to God-forsaken hell (the ultimate place of God-forsakenness) for us, preaching to the spirits of those in prison who formerly did not obey (1 Peter 3:19) giving them the same opportunity for atonement.

God is holy. God is love. Yes, but God is holy love.

Forsyth again,

God must either punish sin or expiate it, for the sake of His infrangibly holy nature…. The one thing He could not do was simply to wipe the slate and write off the loss. He must either inflict punishment or assume it. And He chose the latter course, as honouring the law while saving the guilty. He took his own judgement…. Expiation, therefore, is the very opposite of exacting punishment; it is assuming it (98, emphasis mine).

So once again Paul states this “double imputation,” as Luther called it, in this pithy statement: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…. When we were still powerless, [helpless] Christ died for the ungodly…. God demonstrates his love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us…. Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him…. We also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have received reconciliation (Romans 5:1–11).

God’s wrath is not God’s rage or his temper tantrum. It is God with a broken heart allowing human beings to experience the results of their own arrogant choices (Rom. 1:18–27). Here on the cross we see Jesus, the God man, assuming, imbibing that wrath from the perspective of the human race. God is not apathetic, not the “unmoved mover” of Greek philosophy. The Lamb slain from the creation of the world, Jesus, is God. Are we ready to hear this?

I was in Montreal four years ago, where my wife, Gail, and I began our marriage and our ministry many more years ago. Our church was poor, a true hospital and not a museum of saints. We had alcoholics and people who do “street work.” We took one of them into our home. My wife loved her and washed her. She slept in the living room. Her name was Daisy Slauson. She was beginning to follow Christ, but just beginning. After a week or two, she drifted back to the red-light district of Montreal. I was angry, the kind of anger you nurse when you have invested a lot of energy in someone and then they do not respond, or they goof off. About two days later, she called me on the telephone. She was in a pub on the corner of St. Hubert and St. Catherine streets. All she said was, “Paul, help. Please come to get me.”

In my arrogance, I figured that the effort she would make to get out of the pub and get to the corner so I could pick her up would be roughly 50% of the effort I would make to get in my car and drive down St. Hubert Street to pick her up on the corner. A 50/50 deal. So, I encouraged her to meet me on the corner. When I arrived, she was not there. I went around the block. Not there. I went around the block the other way. Still not there. I started to drive home, wallowing in my pride. Another multi-problem person had wasted my time.

Then God spoke to me. At the right time, when you were powerless, helpless, all you could cry was “Help”… Christ died for you. I did a U-turn in the middle of the road and drove back. I cannot remember where I parked the car. But I looked both ways before I ran into the pub to see if any of the church deacons could see me. And I hugged her and took her home. (I do not know whether I helped her that day, but she helped me.) Perhaps another cross we bear is to accompany folk who cannot or will not get better. We may need to relinquish our need to rescue and get returns on our efforts.

Forsyth again says,

The feeble gospel preaches ‘God is ready to forgive’; the mighty gospel preaches ‘God has redeemed.’ It works not with forgiveness alone, which would be mere amnesty, but with forgiveness in a moral way, with holy forgiveness, a forgiveness which not only restores the soul, but restores it in the only final and eternal way, by restoring in the same act the infinite moral order, and reconstructing mankind from the foundation of a moral revolution (29).

5. God’s justice justifies. By faith we experience full acceptance with God, new life, and the life of the Kingdom of God—justified by faith.

Forsyth says, “The first, last, and supreme question of the soul, of religion when it is practical, is not, ‘How can I think of God?—He or It?’ but it is, ‘What does He think of me? How does It treat me?’ More positively it is ‘How shall I be just with God? How shall I stand before my judge?’…. Where man is not felt to be on his trial before God, God is put on His trial before man, and summoned to explain Himself to the conscience of the time” (59).

Paul in Romans says,

‘It was credited to him [Abraham] as righteousness.’ The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him [Abraham] alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification (Rom. 4:22–25).

In Roland H. Bainton’s biography of Martin Luther, Here I Stand, he pregnantly writes this passage:

I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, ‘The justice of God,’ because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what it meant.

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that that ‘the just shall live by faith.’ Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly in greater love. This passage in Paul became to me a gate to heaven.[3]

So, what does it mean to take up our cross in the marketplace? It means two things. First, we are identifying ourselves with the cross of Christ. We are embracing the justice and the mercy of God on ourselves, and for others, poured out in Jesus and victoriously through resurrection. We do this daily (Luke 9:23). There is an old hymn:

There was none other good enough
To pay the price of sin.
He only could unlock the gate
Of Heaven, and let us in.

And an old spiritual asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The answer is, Yes.

So, we can say with the apostle Paul in Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Can you say this? Can I say this?

But there is a second meaning to taking up our cross. Because we are engaging in the marketplace, and in that situation we encounter the world, the flesh, and the devil, we have suffering to take up. We wrestle not with flesh and blood (not just sinful people) but with principalities and powers, with invisible resistance, with economics, with politics, with demons, with the rulers of this dark age, with greed and the intransigence of institutions. And we will suffer. Yes, suffer. Walter Wright, President of Regent College when I was academic dean, used to say, “You and I have to take the pain of the organization.” But we do so redemptively as we pray and work with Jesus in bringing redemption and hope into what some friends in Hong Kong call “the black hole of slavery in the modern workplace.”

But there is suffering within us, a cross to be taken up, as we wrestle with the world, the flesh and the devil within us. So, in Galatians, after outlining the works of the flesh (not referring mainly to bodily struggles but emotional, spiritual, and relational struggles), Paul says that “those in Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” The solution in taking up this cross is in the next sentence: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (5:24–25).

Paul experienced this, especially in the church when he said in Colossians, “I fill up in my flesh [here referring to his entire bodily life] what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (1:24). In 2 Thessalonians he says, “Therefore among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering” (1:4–5). And in Acts 14 Paul says, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (14:22).

What can this mean? Yes, persecution. Yes, the price of going against the grain of the culture. Yes, the pain of not being understood even by family and even by Christian friends. Yes, the price of being controversial. Yes, the price of standing up for righteousness in the workplace. Yes, through suffering the pain of the workplace and fellow workers. Yes, taking up the cross inwardly as we deal with the works of the flesh. Yes, readiness for suffering because of the claim one makes. That was the lot of the prophets of the first covenant (Luke 11:47–8), the apostles of the second covenant (Acts 5:41), and Jesus himself (1 Pet. 2:21).

Health care workers take up their cross when they care for patients with communicable diseases. We take up our cross when we support a colleague to get help with burnout, substance use, or mental illness. Airport janitors take up their cross when they do meticulous work, disposing of used needles to protect others. “Suffering is the likely lot of all Christians; ‘Faith, love, and the holy cross’ was Martin Luther’s summary of the Christian life.”[4]

So, taking up the cross in the marketplace has two meanings. First, it means identification daily with the cross of Jesus for ourselves, our salvation. We were there with Jesus on that fated Good Friday. Jesus has done everything needed for us to come to him, and stay with him, live with him, and work with him, just as we are, without one plea except that his blood, his holy life force and his entire holy personality was shed, released, for us.

Second, taking up our cross in the marketplace means we identify with Jesus, follow him, live and work with him in the world, into the marketplace knowing we will get crucified (yes, not all at once, but somewhat continuously) but knowing as well that as we follow Jesus we can bring redemption and new life. “For the joy set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). Like Jesus we look beyond the cross we bear to the joy we will have in his presence.

All Scripture references from NIV. 

[1] Marc Kolden, “Luther on Vocation,” Word and World (Fall 1983), Vol 3, No 4:382-290.

[2] Peter T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (London: The Independent Press, 1909/1948).

[3] Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: A Mentor Book, 1950), 49-50.

[4] Martin Luther, “Sermons on the first Epistle of St. Peter,” in Luther’s Works (St. Louis: Concordia, 1967), 30:143, quoted in Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2019), 144.