Matthew 16:21-28
Our Lord has declared war on hell. He has given his rousing speech to the men, “The gates of hell will not prevail against you! Ere the sun rises!” The troops are thrilled. What’s the plan, Lord? What’s our strategy? The Messiah turns to the business of battle: “I’m going to ride right into the middle of the Holy City. I’ll get myself arrested, they’ll torture me, and then I’ll be executed in the most gruesome and inhumane way they can come up with. And then, I’ll come back from the dead.” The disciples, having been lifted up so high by the words that came before, are now completely deflated. So it is not to be the charge of the Winged Hussars, gloriously riding in to lift the siege of Vienna and saving Christendom, so much as the charge of the Light Brigade right into a wall of guns.
Our patron saint is understandably confused. In his great devotion to our Lord, he protests: “You are the Messiah, the Son of God! Do not dirty your holy and venerable hands with this work. Far be it from you – there must be a better way, something more becoming of the Son of Man.”
But Jesus has heard this line before. He knows he is on this earth for one job: to retake it from the enemy. And he knows that the eternal divine plan must be worked out through his sacrificial death and resurrection.
The stakes could not be higher: this is total war, a battle for nothing less than creation. And there is one who has suggested another way in the past. Someone else has offered Christ the easy compromise:
Matthew 4:8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”
11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.
These are the same words that have come of out the mouth of St Peter: “Far be it from you Lord! This shall not happen to you,” and the previous memory flashed in the mind of our Lord. “Get behind me Satan!” he exclaims.
Why is his reaction so strong? Jesus is on the warpath to win the world. But he doesn’t want an empty city filled with nothing but dead bodies. He wants the living souls of human beings. This is the great prize: you and me, able to stand in the presence of a holy and righteous God. And yet we cannot, for all our holiness and righteousness are but filthy rags, flammable, liable to be consumed in the blazing heat of God’s perfection. So in order to square this circle, God has come as a human. He will represent us so that he may be consumed, as it were, in the blazing heat of God’s perfection in our place. Riding into battle only to be captured, tortured and executed is the plan. This is how we might stand guilt-free before God, and enjoy his favour forever. By rising again, Christ will prove two things: there is no punishment for God’s people, for it has been emptied out on him; and he continues as our representative by being the first of the new human race: material, and yet also eternal. Physical, and never fading. His objective is a city of the living.
If this sounds like a leader you could love and follow: good! He is our Lord, friend, brother, and God. He is the only one worth following. Listen, therefore, to what he says next. Here are the marching orders for his troops; the battle-plan for victory:
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
To deny ourselves is to obey our Lord’s command to embrace the beauty of divine love as a way of life. Just has he did, we are to try. What of yourself is worth keeping? What is worth holding back? What do you want to hang onto to make yourself feel better? Consider the Lord Jesus: he had it all. Godhood in the heavenly places. Yet he denied himself, became man, suffered and died. This was his response to the love of God, and his way of pouring out the love of God upon us.
To “pick up our cross” is the demonstration of how we are to fight, and what weapons we are to use. The fight is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers and dominions. The greatest enemy is sin. And so we are to pick up the only weapon that can kill sin: the cross. One of the old Reformers said it like this: be killing your sin, or your sin will be killing you. The theological term is “mortification”: the practise of death to indwelling sin. Do you have anger lurking in you? Crucify it. Is there an inclination to lust? Crucify it. Jealousy? Nail it to the cross. Greed? Covetousness? Selfishness? Pick up your cross and mortify your sins.
This is, as Jesus finishes by saying, the way to discover ourselves:
25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Christ is the one through whom we were made, the one through whom we are remade, and the one through whom we continue to exist. We do not discover ourselves in ourselves. We have an end point. We can search as much as we like but we will eventually find a brick wall and still be left with questions about ourselves. But to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow Jesus is to walk the path of self discovery, for we discover ourselves in him.
They say an army marches on its stomach. And so Christ has given us himself in the holy meal we are soon to share. We discover ourselves by denying ourselves, waking up every day and taking the cross to our sins, and following Jesus. The ability to do this comes from Christ himself; we cannot do it ourselves, but only in his strength and by his grace. So let us come to this Table of the Lord, throwing down our crowns and denying ourselves, willing and ready to hear his kind words of forgiveness, and receive the grace he so freely gives. He has given us our lives back; he is our life. Let us feed not on ourselves, but on life itself.