From a netfriend:

This is an excerpt from John Howard Yoder’s “The Politics of Jesus”, where he talks a great deal about bearing one’s cross, and the inevitable suffering that comes with genuine commitment to Christ. He then tempers those comments with this passage.

“This Gospel concept of the cross of the Christian does not mean that suffering is thought of as in itself redemptive or that martyrdom is a value to be sought after. Nor does it refer uniquely to being persecuted for “religious” reasons by an outspokenly pagan government. What Jesus refers to in his call to cross-bearing is rather the seeming defeat of the strategy of obedience which is no strategy, the inevitable suffering of those whose only goal is to be faithful to that love which puts one at the mercy of one’s neighbour, which abandons claims to justice for oneself and for one’s own in an overriding concern for the reconciling of the adversary and the estranged…

We thus do not adequately understand what the church was praising in the work of Christ, and what Paul was asking his readers to be guided by, if we think of the cross as a particularly efficacious technique (probably effective only in certain circumstances) for getting one’s way. The key to the ultimate relevance and to the triumph of the good is not any calculation at all, paradoxical or otherwise, of efficacy, but rather simple obedience. Obedience means not keeping verbally enshrined rules but reflecting the character of the love of God. The cross is not a recipe for resurrection. Suffering is not a tool to make people come around, nor a good in itself. But the kind of faithfulness that is willing to accept evident defeat rather than complicity with evil is, by virtue of its conformity with what happens to God when he works among men [and women], aligned with the ultimate triumph of the Lamb.”

This was a revelation for me, and a helpful one, and again reinforces the idea of paradox; the strategy which is no strategy.