(Luke 24:13-32 Luke 9:23-24) 

It would be an inexcusable error to eliminate the Cross from Christ's life, just as it would be to neglect the Resurrection.  

Both are part of the one mystery in Christ. A cross without resurrection would not be Christ's cross, and deathless resurrection is oxymoronic. 

focal point of Christ's life 

Two disciples lost no time in rebuilding their lives after seeing Christ, whom they had hoped would be the one to redeem Israel, die on the cross. They set out for home at an early hour the first day the law allowed them to travel, though their hearts were still heavy and they couldn't avoid talking about what had happened. Christ catches up with them on the road to Emmaus, and you know what happened. (Luke 24:13-32) 

When they had told him their sadness over their hopes dashed by the cross ...he said to them, "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.  

What a lesson it must have been! And it wasn't the dry explanation of a detached academic either: Didn't our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures? they said afterwards.  

Christ spoke passionately about his cross and the need for him to suffer it. It was a conviction he held deep in his heart. It was something that he knew all along and prepared himself for. It was not an accident that surprised him one day when things started to go terribly wrong. When he saw that the soldiers were in earnest he did not call upon his Father to send legions of angels to protect him from death. He had a baptism to be baptized with, and felt constrained until it was accomplished. 

And John gives us the following words when Christ's human will is feeling the closeness of the moment of supreme sacrifice, Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? "Father, save me from this hour?" No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name. (John 12:27-28a) 

Christ had long since set his face on Jerusalem. His cross was no surprise and no error. It was only a surprise for his disciples because they did not listen to him, and kept thinking as man thinks and not as God does when he foretold it. 

a condition to follow him 

During his life, Christ predicts his own passion and death, and he also predicts the cross in the life of every one of his followers.  

He said to all, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his own life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. (Luke 9:23-24) 

Note that Christ said this to all his followers, so surely it applies even more so to those who follow him more closely through a life consecrated to poverty, chastity and obedience; and in a special way to those who are identified with him in the priesthood.  

Christ gives everyone sufficient warning that his way is not the easy way. Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. (Matthew 7:13-14) 

And he also leaves us in no doubt that his cross will be our cross if we follow him; the servant is no greater than the master, if they have persecuted me they will persecute you.  

However, paradoxically, Christ never separates the cross from hope, and life, and joy. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.  

And remember, the narrow way is to be chosen because it leads to life.  

a condition to bear fruit 

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Again see here the emphasis our Lord places on the positive side. His Father is a God of life, not of death. Before, he was saying how this death to ourselves is the condition for life. Here he stresses the other fruits. He has a hard time convincing us, and we resist his efforts, because we are so used to the false idea of "having life" that the world and our fallen nature teach us and seek after.  

Any follower of Christ has to ask him in prayer to upend this worldly mentality we all have. Because if we do not believe in and preach Christ's message, what are we going to give the world? More of the same? There will be no conversions if we do not preach the cross, and our preaching will be sterile if we do not live the cross we preach, for we will preach with the emptiness of the pharisees who bound heavy bundles for others to carry and did not lift a finger themselves to move them.  

"The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians," is a saying that goes back to the earliest times of the Church, summing up its own experience of the fruitfulness of the cross, when the death of Christians out of fidelity to Christ did not bring about the end of the Church, but instead its extraordinary growth. 

a special message for the world 

When choosing to take up our cross, it is not so much that we are choosing between a life without crosses and a life with crosses, as deciding which cross to choose, or what meaning to give to the crosses that are part and parcel of our very existence. Cross and suffering are inescapable realities. It is not only Christians who have to go to the hospital, and it is not only Christians who have to bear moral sufferings, or who have to pay a price to attain their ideals.  

The mystery of suffering touches every human life. Every person born on this earth has to face his own mortality. And how he does so determines how he lives and his impositions on those around him.  

Our consumer society today has set its parameters wholly within the material world, opting for its fleeting satisfactions and comforts, and the cult of the body. In the process it has bred a culture of death and egotism, a grinding and dehumanizing reduction of man to the material, where he has no greater value than a tree or snaildarter. 

To save our society, to give it some hope, we are going to have to take Christ at his word, believe that his cross is the only road to life, and live and preach that, giving this same hope to everyone around us. As we search for our vocation, we should not make the mistake of looking for the wide and easy way. Even less should we commit the injustice of preaching the wide and easy way as the way of life - for it is precisely the way that has led to the despair and suicide into which our western civilization is falling.