Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
Peter didn't want to hear about the suffering and death of Jesus himself. Now he heard Jesus calling all his would-be disciples to come after him and to embrace their own crosses as well. The horrible reality of crucifixion was too familiar at time to be regarded as mere embellishment or symbolism. Crucifixion was a shocking image, and it was hard to imagine what value willing taking up ones own cross could have.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Who wouldn't wish to save his own life? And it is true that we are meant to be good stewards of the life we have been given. Yet, if we insist on this life as our most important goal we will eventually come to realize that it is a doomed enterprise from the start. This life cannot last forever, nor, in this form, would we really want it to do so. Yet we all, in one way or another, desire to save ourselves. Billionaires spend their billions trying to become immortal. But we ourselves are often so protective of a comfortable life in this world that we are unwilling to risk or to sacrifice much at all. We act as though the temporary pleasures and comforts of this life can be made to endure forever, we build silos for them, and hope to gain the whole world. When we do manage to give of ourselves we are often only willing to give from our surplus and to the degree that we are able to do so with ease and relative comfort.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world
and forfeit his life?
How invested are we in things that are finally only temporary? Are we treating those things as though they will last forever, using them to inoculate our minds against the pressing realities of change, decay, and death? Are we trying to save our lives in the world by putting the inevitable end of those lives as far from our minds as possible? It need not be so. We can in fact instead pass through this world without being tied down by it, and use the things of this world as though not using them (see First Corinthians 7:31). But we can only do this if we learn what to do about our eventual end, if we learn to number our days aright.
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
It is only in giving our lives away that we receive that which truly lasts. It is a paradox to our minds and our emotions often tell us that the exact opposite is true. But it is only in giving of ourselves that we discover who we truly are. It is in shedding the protective shell of life in this world that we grow into what we are truly meant to be. Our emotions tell us to stop, warning us that to follow this path will mean the end of us. But if we listen instead to the voice of Jesus we will find that the things we have given away we could not have kept and that, as a consequence, we received more than we could have imagined. What is it that is received? It is the very life of God making possible this sacrificial love within our hearts.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose" - Jim Elliot
If we embrace the call to follow Jesus it is not because we hate ourselves or wish to destroy ourselves. It is rather because what he promises is better than anything the world can offer, is something that the world cannot take away, and that outlast the kingdoms of this earth, and that alone endures forever.
Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here
who will not taste death
until they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.
If the life of Jesus is in our hearts our bodies may die but our souls will live to behold the coming of the Son of Man and the establishment of the Kingdom alone which will not be shaken or destroyed.
“Learn then that I, I alone, am God,
and there is no god besides me.
It is I who bring both death and life,
I who inflict wounds and heal them.”
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