Take Up Your Cross: Giving Without Calculation

On the Sunday after the Elevation of the Cross, Daniel McInnes asks what it actually means to take up your cross and follow Christ. Our whole life — not just the Sunday part of it — is the cross we are given to bear, and bearing it well means giving to the people around us without calculating the cost or the return. Drawing on his work as a mathematician and on his days at the Defence Academy, he shows how the modern instinct to optimise everything fails in the places that matter most, and how even involuntary suffering trains us to give with our whole heart.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This week we're continuing the theme of the Holy Cross. Last week we had the Elevation of the Holy Cross, and this week we turn to our individual response — what we need to do with respect to the cross.

In the reading today, our Lord says: "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." And he said to them, "Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power."

So our Lord says that anyone who wants to follow Christ must take up his cross and follow him. The first question, then, is: what is the cross in each individual person's life? What are we talking about when we talk about the cross?

When I was growing up, that was a bit of a narrow thing. You thought about it in a church context: what is the thing that God wants you to do? What is the thing God wants you to do, and then you go and do it — that's your cross. But I don't think that's really how we should read this, because all of us are born into this world without any choice in the matter. We come into this world and we have to live it. We can think of this entire life as a cross that we need to bear.

We bear it — hopefully voluntarily — for Christ. The entirety of our life. Not little bits and pieces of it. Not just the Sunday bit, but the whole lot, from start to finish. The entirety of our life is in the shape of a cross, and we need to take up that cross and carry it.

What does it mean to take up our cross and carry it? We can do a number of things with the cross. We could deny it. Some people deny the cross; they don't want to follow it, they run away. We could do that. Or we could follow it in a kind of calculating way.

I'm a mathematician. My specialty is probability and statistics, but what I did my PhD in was optimisation — optimal control of systems where there's some randomness in them. So I was always thinking about how we control things. How do we make things work out in the way that we want? How do I reduce the amount of effort for the maximum amount of output? That's the natural thing we do as mathematicians.

And if we think about the way we are in modern society, that's pretty much how we approach everything. We are always thinking about how to maximise efficiency, how to put in the least effort for the maximum gain. It's a natural way of thinking, and because in the modern world technology is so powerful, it's become our default way of thinking about everything.

This week I saw a video about the proposed train line to the airport, and how it's been decades and decades in the proposing. It might come, but it might be 2038 — often it's in the never-never. I was thinking about that story, and I thought: if they ever did it, that would be great. And then I thought about Tokyo. There's the Tokyo Metro and the Toei subway line, and in the greater Tokyo area there are some thirty-odd million people. Every single day those two systems carry around 10.4 million people altogether. That's almost double the population of Melbourne travelling on that train system every day. That is a feat. It's an amazing feat. How do they do that? It's incredible.

We can do those things now. We have lights, we have gas, we have water; everything basically works. Sometimes things don't work, but basically they do, and in some cases they work fantastically well. So our ability to optimise, our ability to do all of these things, is really a blessing, and thank God he's given people the ability to do them. But it doesn't apply in every area of life — and yet we have a tendency to try to make it work in every area of our lives.

There are lots of places in life where that's just not the right thing to do when we're bearing our cross. There are many cases where we don't count, we don't calculate, we don't think about the cost. It's not as though I think, "Well, if I make dinner tonight it takes me an hour, and I earn $65 an hour, so that's $65 — and I could be doing something else, so let's think about the penalty rates; maybe that's $80 I've spent making dinner. Now the rest of the family owes me $80." You can think about it that way. And then you can also think about how long that would last before some pretty serious consequences happened.

We cannot approach our real-life relations with people in that way. We give without thinking about what the cost is going to be, or what the return is. That's bearing our cross in real life — in real life, with the real people around us.

As I said at the start, the cross is all-encompassing. It's everything. It's the shape of our life. If we bear it well, that means that in all of the most important relationships, in all the most important places in our life, we give. We give without thinking about what that cost is, or how we're going to get it back, or any calculation. We just give. We give knowing that, as Christ has promised us, if we give without doing that calculation, we will gain our lives.

What does that mean? I have a kind of silly example from my own life of the sort of thing that happens when you do the calculations. I was in the army, at the Defence Academy, and at the Defence Academy the first thing they teach you is how to wear a uniform. So you wear your uniform and you go on parade, and someone comes along and checks your uniform, and if there's anything wrong they give you something called a check parade. A check parade means that the next day you have to go down to the parade ground at about five in the afternoon, and someone comes along and does another inspection to check the things you got wrong the day before. And if you get something wrong again, you get another couple of check parades. That's how you get on the check-parade roundabout — they continue to grow. As long as you don't wear your uniform properly, the number of check parades keeps growing until you are continuously on check parades for the rest of your existence that year.

Like all young men, I was always thinking about how I could get away with doing the least possible work on my uniform and still pass these parades. And what I found out very quickly is that it just doesn't work. You actually have to do the work. You have to do it without the calculation. You have to go and shine your shoes, iron your shirt, do all that stuff. You just have to do it, without holding anything back. And there are so many things in life that are like that, where we just have to do it because it's the thing that needs to be done.

Now, you might say that's a simple or silly example, but it's also in some sense an example of something important in our lives, which is involuntary suffering. That, to me, was involuntary suffering: I had to do all these parades, and I didn't like it, but I had to do it. And what was the result? The result was that eventually I figured out how to look after my uniform without any shortcuts — just put the effort in and do it. So now I can iron shirts, I can shine shoes, I can do all of that.

So the involuntary suffering in life is not simply something horrible that we should look at and think we want to be rid of entirely. The involuntary sufferings we have in life are there to train us, so that we stop doing the calculation, so that we actually start saying, "Okay, I'm just going to put in whatever I need to put in — for the sake of the other person, for the sake of the situation, for the sake of whatever it happens to be." When we do that, it carries over into all of the other things we do in life. All the things we take on voluntarily then take on that same character: whatever we do, we start to do it with our whole heart. We do it voluntarily, with our whole heart, because that's the nature of the way we've been trained through the other things we've gone through in our lives.

So what our Lord is saying to us is that your life is a cross. You bear it, and you bear it well. Bearing it well means giving without calculation — giving continuously and always, out of a heart of love and out of love for the other. Give, give, give, give, give. Don't expect anything in return, because at the end of the day it's God who will provide the reward. We don't have to worry about the reward; God provides the reward. We just have to do what we have to do.

So this week, as we go through the week, I encourage people to look at yourself and at how you approach situations, and to think: in this situation, am I giving my all? Am I giving what I know I should give? Or am I trying to think about how I can cut corners? Am I trying to think about how I can save a bit of time so that I can do the things I want to do? Maybe we should spend a little bit of time thinking about that, so that we can really be there with and for the people around us whom God has given us. Amen.