09/01/2026
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
The Cross of Self-Sufficiency
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
In a homily on Matthew 16, public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber highlights how Jesus’s teaching on “carrying your cross” was not intended to increase the suffering of those on the margins:
In our Gospel text for today, Jesus says that those who wish to follow him must deny themselves, and take up their cross, and those who wish to save their life must lose it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are just the kinds of messages that would never make Jesus an influencer today. He’d never get more than twelve followers these days with that kind of branding….
Maybe like you, I struggle with how this denying ourselves thing is good news. And not just because of how that verse about picking up your cross has been perverted into messages like deny your Queerness, pick up your cross of heterosexuality and follow him. Or deny your dignity and pick up your cross of continued domestic abuse and follow him.
Bolz-Weber understands the cross as that which keeps us from relying on God and one another:
Recently I’ve been wondering: if, when Jesus says deny yourself and follow me, that maybe it’s not about ensuring his followers are doormats. Maybe he’s inviting us to deny the part of us that wants to see itself as separate from God and others.
Deny the self that believes that spirituality should be a suffering avoidance program.
Deny the self that always creates a list of demands.
Deny the self that is so turned in on itself that it cannot see much of anything beyond itself.
Deny the self that says really horrible things to you about you.
Deny the self that pretends you never need help….
Because in the end, one aspect of the whole death and resurrection thing that Jesus promised us, is the death of the false self.
But the death of the false self doesn’t feel good. In fact, Richard Rohr once wrote that “holiness never feels like holiness, it just feels like you’re dying.”…
But no matter how painful, when the unhealthy ideas and habits and identities we rely on are taken away from us, it just makes space for that which is actually real and actually holy….
We offer no me-based solutions here. Then you know what we have to offer instead? Divine foolishness. The kind that says that if you want to save your life you must lose it and if you lose your life you will find it….
The cross is foolishness to those whose own solutions are still working for them, but to the weak and the cynical and the socially awkward and the exhausted … to the divorced and the unemployed and the alcoholics … in other words, to all who are in need of help and rest, Christ crucified (the foolishness of God) is life in a way that our own solutions can never be—in a way that more status, and more degrees and more financial security can never be.
