The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected
by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Jesus did not come primarily to teach or to heal or to perform other miraculous deeds. Those actions were inevitable because of who he was. But he chiefly came, was born into this world, in order to die. Yet he did this not out of a sense of masochism nor was he merely a soldier resigned to defeat. He planned to die in order to destroy death. He did it, as the book of Hebrews tells us, for the joy that was set before him (see Hebrews 12:2).
If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
We are called by Jesus not primarily to learn, or to be healed, nor even to learn to act in a way that is morally upright. All of these things are part of the call of Jesus, but they must not obscure the big picture, which is that we have been called to die and to rise again in him.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
If we target anything less than the life Jesus intends for us we risk losing that after which we strive. Nothing that can be had apart from Jesus, apart from the path he created through death to life eternal, nothing apart from that can truly be held in a lasting and permanent way. Apart from that health eventually deteriorates, great learning is forgotten, even virtue cannot remain indefinitely.
The only path that is open to us one of losing our lives, but not merely in order to throw them away. We are called to lose our lives for love, specifically for the sake of Jesus himself, and are promised that when we do so we will truly find them, in a depth and reality that we have heretofore not known.
By calling us to the cross God is not trying to punish us or to make us suffer for suffering's sake. He is calling us to the one true path to life, the only way that the damage done by sin can finally be overcome. He does this because he does desire us to live, does in fact desire to share his own life with us. In proof of the fact that it isn't a ruse or a trap he himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, first blazed the trail before asking us to follow. He himself revealed the radiant glory of the life that awaits us. Let us, therefore, choose life. Let us settle for nothing less.
I have set before you life and death,
the blessing and the curse.
Choose life, then
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