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The Master also declared that the disciples were to think of themselves as blessed when they endured persecution for righteousness' sake, for men had persecuted the prophets in all ages. The implication is that knowledge of and sympathy with the prophets came out of cross-bearing like that of the prophets.
Long before the end He had predicted the kind of death He should die; but even before these predictions had commenced He had described the sacrifices which would have to be made by those who became His disciples as cross-bearing as if this were the last extreme of suffering and indignity.
It means carrying the burdens which are inevitable in cross-bearing. There is good reason for believing that the very highest step in spiritual learning is taken only through the willingness to bear the cross. In our modern educational systems we lay varying degrees of stress upon the importance of different methods of acquiring knowledge.
From our post at the head of the Prospekt we behold not the ceremony itself but the framework of a great national picture, the great Palace Square, whereon twenty thousand troops can manoeuvre, and in whose centre rises the greatest monolith of modern times, the shaft of red Finland granite, eighty-four feet in height, crowned with a cross-bearing angel, the monument to Alexander I. There stand the Guards' Corps, and the huge building of the General Staff, containing the Ministries of Finance and of Foreign Affairs, and many things besides, originally erected by Katherine II. to mask the rears of the houses at the end of the Nevsky, and rebuilt under Nicholas I., sweeping in a magnificent semicircle opposite the Winter Palace.
And ever as he rode, by his side rode the archbishop, wearing his chasuble and bearing aloft the cross. The Moorish troops, who had been jeering at the king and the cross-bearing prelate, drew back before this impetuous assault, which was given force by the troops who crowded in to the rescue of the king. The Moors soon yielded to the desperate onset, and were driven back in wild disarray.
In the after days it was when the saints faced stoning that they saw the heavens opening; it was the apostle who had suffered hardships almost too numerous to mention who got the most positive conviction of the reward which awaited him. In the school of Christ the very heaviest stress must fall upon the indispensability of cross-bearing as a means to understanding.
Thus it is in the revelations of the divine purpose in the Scriptures. It is hard to make out how anybody can hope to master a revelation of a cross-bearing God without himself being a cross-bearer.
So it is with many a life. It has its great days, its Palm Sundays of triumphs, its Good Fridays of cross-bearing, and these seem the epochs of its experience; but when one searches for the sources of its strength, they lie do they not? in some unrecorded day, as the sources of an abundant river lie hidden in some nook among the hills. Luke xxii. 39-48.
He should ask concerning his personal observance of the Master's counsel of prayer and self-denial and cross-bearing. It is pleasanter, no doubt, to seek the reasons for one's unbelief in intellectual than in moral directions. The former method may flatter us a little; the latter is often very painful! And yet by inquiring as to our moral condition the whole secret will often be discovered.
This is a lively image of the cross-bearing to which the followers of Christ are called. We are wont to speak of trouble of any kind as a cross; and doubtless any kind of trouble may be borne bravely in the name of Christ. But, properly speaking, the cross of Christ is what is borne in the act of confessing Him or for the sake of His work.
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