Just the other day, my wife, Liz, made a cross-like structure out of some robot-shaped building blocks while playing with my girls. Tempest, my two-year old theologian, responded to Liz’s cross with these words: “You made a cross, Momma! Good job! Now somebody can die.” 
Liz posted a picture of the cross and Tempest’s words on social media, to which I replied “well, at least she knows what a cross is for.” There’s something to that. While the Cross does not confront us with particular fear anymore, partially because we know that Jesus paid its penalty and mostly because we don’t know anyone who has been crucified recently, it is a structure that is erected for a purpose – and that purpose is death.
In this past week’s readings, when Jesus tells His disciples that they must “bear their own cross and come after Me,” they are not hearing that statement with any sense of a “glorified cross”. The cross in their imaginations wasn’t filigreed, gilded, or otherwise decorated. The cross in their imaginations was not to be hung around the neck as a signal to our obvious internal virtue, nor was it to be worn defiantly sequined alongside words like “affliction”. The cross in their imaginations was made so that, again in Tempest’s doctrinal clarity, “somebody can die.”
Liz isn’t the only person who makes a cross. I do it at least a few times every Sunday. And the effect is the same. I open the worship service “making the Cross” over myself. What is the purpose of that? Now somebody can die. And He did, for me. In a few moments I make the Cross over a bunch of sinners who just confessed words of repentance and faith. The effect? Somebody can die. And He did, for you. Baptisms? I make the Cross on the head and heart of those being baptized. What happens now? Now somebody can die. He did, and so shall you. And because He did and rose again, so shall we.