What does it mean to "Take up your cross"?

[joejay]

I understand what the cross means today but what did it mean before Jesus was crucified? Was it an everyday word that represented the same thing to everyone? How does it differ from what we think of when we hear that word?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Today, we think of “taking up one’s cross” as accepting the suffering we have in our lives and offering it up to God in union with Christ’s suffering and death. In Jesus’ time, taking up one’s cross literally meant to pick up the means of one’s execution and tote it to the spot on which the person would be painfully executed in one of the most shame-inducing means of capital punishment that man ever invented (i.e., being stripped, bound to a wooden cross, and having one’s slow, agonizing death displayed to the world). In today’s jargon, the invitation of Christ would be similar to this invitation:

See that gurney with leather straps over there? I want you to drag it to the execution chamber so that you can be stretched out upon it, strapped down, and injected with a lethal dosage. Follow me.