The Cross and Stress

[HKHaugan]

The Cross and Stress

       If we want a picture of spiritually handling stress all we have to do is see how Jesus did it.  The Cross is the major symbol, image and reality of the final stress that sums up all stress, death.  It is the logical place to start since death begins fear, the fear that saturates the self-centering lifestyle and tempts the heart’s vulnerability.  That mindset is summed up in Henley’s arrogant poem Invictus, “I am the master of my fate.  I am the captain of my soul.”  That will last as long as the body lives but what about facing physical death?  What then? 

       The problem with a non-spiritual mindset is that there is more to death than a funeral. It starts long before that. It is also emotional and spiritual. It comes in the crib when a baby cries for closeness or food or about an inner pain.  Parental mistakes and family tensions breed fear as do kid’s disputes, gang mentality, social snobbery.  It can be felt in the loss of a job, a broken relationship, divorce, the end of any activity, retiring from a profession, the deeper feeling of aloneness, personal failure and rejection.  Death is terminal and begins its journey in birth and on throughout life.  

       Add what you will, but termination is part of the world we live in.  Does it ever occur to us that airplanes, trains and busses all have trips that end in terminals?  Games are played and trophies given, then they terminate.  Winning and losing are momentary.  Graveyards dot the landscape.  Monuments and memorials keep reminding us.  Memories of the past, people, events and places, deserted homes and towns, ruins of past civilizations, cultural trends, fads and expressions change, society in flux. Nations maintain armies, wars come and go, disease and accidents, health crises, all carry the sting of death.  There is both visible and invisible death, history records them. Nostalgia, longing for a past atmosphere, becomes the science of consuming procrastination, denying the inevitable. 

       The point here is not morbidity but reality.  What do we do between the start of anything and the end of anything?  What do we fill our livesthe life He lived with?  What makes life worthwhile, feeling fulfilled?

       One combined occasion, one combined event, one jarring visible sequence changed the unseen landscape of humanity’s meaningless existence.  Death with its preparatory fear, pride, aloneness, sin and evil were thrown into the grave by the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He alone absorbed the full impact of death on the Cross and rose from the dead.  “He who knew no sin was made sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God (2Cor.5:21).”  His purpose that we might have a relationship with Him now and into eternity, a relationship built on faith in Him like the faith He had on the Cross.  “The righteous shall live by faith (Rom.1:17).”  While we wallowed around in the muddy flats of self-justification, rationalization, blame and self-excuse, Jesus showed faith to be the lubricant of real life.  He lifts us out of the mire of ur self-conscious to feed in the green pastures of the Word and the Spirit.  He introduces us to the Father and the Holy Spirit and the nw family of the faithful with whom we will live forever.

       Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection are the elevation of spirituality as the foundation of thought and behavior.  Intellect and emotion yield to the authority of their Creator.  Those combined events raise the challenge to lost humanity to see Jesus as the way to process life, the truth to orient our mind and His faith as our new lifestyle in the Spirit. 

       Now everything we think and do is spiritualized.  Our reason, our attitudinal responses and our motivation (mind, heart and spirit) are centered in Jesus.  His Word becomes the way we reason, adjust our perceptive heart and motivate our responses.

       Now all of this is to say that stress is replaced by faith.  The way of the Cross began early in Jesus’ life.  He was born to die.  He chose to die as a sacrifice for each of us, a spiritual sacrifice that only He could make.  If we look at the life of Jesus from the time He was born, He experienced stressed parents escaping to save His life, being raised in a stressed family that later saw Him as mentally unbalanced, stressed religious leaders who thought He was possessed.by demons, the same leaders conspiring to kill Him. No one was ever as alone as Him.  Every one of those experiences of hostility directed at Him would have melted the strongest of us.

       Then the Cross.  There is no way any of us can even imagine what that must have been like for Him.  We have only His last words.  But even those words summed up how He handled the ultimate stress of facing physical death.  For Him death was more than physical.  It was spiritual, it was emotional, it was attitudinal, it was social, it was personal, it was relational.  He had been facing it all His life.  The Cross, sinful man’s chosen way to define humanity, denigrate, subjugate and divide people into classes and groups.  The world’s most powerful nation used the fear of death on the cross for control.  He knew it lay before Him.  His life would be judged, evaluated and condemned by the stress of leaders and people who acted unjustly and knowing it.  They were all afraid for their lives and they justified and rationalized His death to save themselves.  That’s sin, the basic negative human dynamic, the basic cause of internal and relational conflict.  Every nation, community and group suffers from its basic fear and pride-possessed leadership. 

       When Jesus said we have to take up our cross and follow Him, He was speaking directly to every single human being in the world.  The daily practice of putting Him first in our mind, heart and spirit is the practice of relieving stress.  It is not easy.  No one should even say it is.  Undoing how we have been conditioned by the world around us takes patience and effort and how it is done is different in each person.  How does the life of Jesus relieve the stress of life?  How He did it.

       First, He placed the will of His Father above all His decisions.  He was talking to and obeying a living Father in a living relationship.  With Jesus it was always His Father first  

       Second, He set goals.  It was moving from one place and person to another, going where He was led. 

       Third, He followed the Scripture.  He fulfilled the tole of the Scripturally promised Messiah.

       Fourth, the ledge upon which He stood, prayer.  Ledge, because choice and decision are always a precipice for every individual and Jesus the Rock is always there at the ledge’s edge.

       Stress, therefore, is no longer dreading future circumstance but using it as a way to experience life spiritually.  Obviously, we don’t change overnight.  We have been conditioned by so many fear factors in our lives.  From parental fear for our safety and welfare, our personal frightening experiences to the pressures of unwritten social laws around us, we have a lot to overcome.  Stress is fear’s most insistent companion, but “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world (1Jn.4:4).”