What is a Disciple? Part 4: The Cross by Dan Roach

The Cross is the single most important aspect of discipleship.

As Steven Smallman has written, ‘How to disciple, whatever form it takes, must grow from a basic conviction that the gospel is the essential tool we need to make disciples.’ Only because of Jesus’ death and resurrection can we respond to the call to follow him. It is at the cross that all disciples of Jesus acknowledge their sin, guilt and shame whether for the first time or the hundredth time. There we find forgiveness and freedom from our sinful past, hope for the future and power to change and become more like Jesus in the present. Everything flows from there.

Just as everything in the Gospel accounts leads up to the death and resurrection of Jesus, so too there is a real sense in which all the training and teaching of the disciples has been building up to this same point. This was the major emphasis of Jesus’ discipleship teaching.[1]

It is a mistake to think that we can ever follow Jesus faithfully in our own strength, apart from his work on the Cross. The Gospels show us that. Discipleship is woven into their climactic final passages as Jesus teaches the disciples about his impending death, firstly in the upper room during the Passover meal and then as they follow him to the Mount of Olives where he is dramatically arrested in the middle of the night.[2] After these two scenes, Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection take centre stage, encouraging us as disciples to focus our attention on it, rather than on ourselves.

At this point in the story, the disciples blew it. For three years, they had followed Jesus everywhere from the shores of Galilee to the garden of Gethsemane. But in his hour of greatest need, every single one of them abandoned him and fled in fear as he was arrested, tried and then brutally crucified.[3]

We don’t have the desire or the courage to follow Jesus in our own strength. Yet Jesus’ death on the Cross enables us to not only come to him in the first place, but to come back to him again and again. There he secured our relationship with him and there we find hope and power to go again, forgiven, and free.

As disciples, we are prone to wander from Jesus and follow after other things. In the Gospels, we see that Jesus responds by coming after us in love and tenderness because he is so committed to us. The Gospel of John, in particular, emphasises this point. After Jesus’ death, we read that the disciples, downcast and dejected, knowing that they had let down their master, went back to their old way of life as fishermen in Galilee. How did the resurrected Jesus respond? He went to find them, called them in from the shore, and cooked breakfast for them at the very place where their discipleship relationship with him had begun, some three years previously. They had failed him, but he forgave them. And in one of the most poignant passages in all of the Gospels, he recommissioned Peter and issued the same words to him as before: ‘Follow me’.[4]  

We go to Jesus’ Cross to begin our life of discipleship and we must return to it again and again from then on. Michael Horton writes, ‘Jesus does call us to discipleship…However, before we can serve, we must be served by our Saviour…This humble receiving is not a one-time thing at the beginning of our Christian life, so that we can get on with the real business of discipleship…It is the well to which disciples return every week, every day. It is their daily bread.’ Apart from the gospel, we are inadequate and imperfect disciples of Jesus, but as we turn and return to it, we can see and feel that we are growing and learning and are able to help each other follow Jesus better. This is remarkable.

The Cross changes everything.

[1] Matt. 16:21-23; 20:17-19, 20-28; 26:1-2, 6-12; Mark 8:31-33; 10:32-34, 35-45; Luke 9:43-45; 18:31-34; John 13:1-20, 34-35; 15:1-17.

[2] Matt. 26:20-24, 36-46; Luke 22:7-53.

[3] Matt. 26:31-35, 56.

[4] John 21.