Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come with Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.” (Matthew 16:24)
A moment before Jesus spoke these words, Peter was discomfited by his own conflicting priorities. He had given his life to follow Jesus, but now he found himself arguing with Jesus and taking Satan’s side in the fight.
He had been named “rock” and promised a unique place in the foundations of the church, yet now this rock was sitting not in the foundation, perfectly placed to strengthen his fellow believers, but in the middle of the road. “Thinking about man’s concerns instead of God’s,” he spent a bewildering moment transformed into a literal stumbling block in Jesus’s path.
Jesus didn’t leave him stuck there, though: waking him with a sharp rebuke, he immediately showed him the way to be free.
In essence, he told Peter to shake off the dust of his plans, politics, and worries and follow his deepest desire instead.
A Journey of Delight
“The entire life of a good Christian,” Augustine of Hippo wrote in the fourth century AD, “is in fact an exercise of holy desire.”
I think we too easily miss this: desire comes first, before self-denial and taking up the cross. If desire does not lead our denial, we will run out of steam and give up before the end. But if we drop into this desire and let it go deep, driving us from a hungry place within, we’ll make it to the end. Desire for Jesus will keep us going.
“If anyone wants to come with Me,” Jesus said.
The word translated “want” is Greek thelo; poke it, and it explodes in a riot of color: “to will, decide, want to; wish, desire, choose; deliberately, delight, determine, have the desire to, please (and pleased), prefer.”
These are powerful emotions, powerful actions. Following Jesus involves our heart. That’s why we can do it even when it seems illogical or harmful to our best interests. And that’s what Jesus is getting at here.
Yes, he acknowledged, naturally we want to save our lives. Of course we do; life is a great good. But there is a greater good, and a greater desire: Christ himself. If you yearn for him, if you want him, if you even want to want him —
Heed that desire, and follow.
The Skandalon in the Way
Like Peter, I want to follow Jesus. But frequently, I find that I am standing in my own way.
I desire to follow Jesus, but I trip over my own fear. I trip over past hurts and wounds, traumas that freeze me in place. I trip over my confusion and my lack of understanding. I trip over my (very natural) desire to look out for myself, over distractions, over half-heartedness and lack of faith.
I am the skandalon, the stumbling block, in my own path.
The solution, Jesus tells me, is to deny myself. The self-denial he calls me to is not a rejection of my deepest being but a renunciation of “man’s concerns” so that I will be able to follow God’s instead. Remember, back in the parable of the sower Jesus warned us that for most people, the greatest impediment to a faithful life won’t be some spectacular opposition but just the daily grind and lesser desires that tend to consume us: “Now the one sown among the thorns—this is one who hears the word, but the worries of this age and the seduction of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).
This was Peter’s problem in the previous exchange: tangled up in man’s concerns, he was unable to embrace the will of God.
In denying myself to follow Christ, I choose my deeper desire. I renounce my fears and the claims of my natural life on myself. I renounce my right to satisfaction, safety, clarity, acknowledgment. I cast my cares on the Lord, as Peter himself later urged us to do, trusting that he will care for me; and instead I magnify the Lord and follow him.*
I step over the stumbling block, or around it, or simply stand before it and bleat like a sheep until Jesus moves it out of the way.
(Sometimes that’s the best I can do.)
I do all this not for its own sake, as though self-denial were a virtue in a vacuum, but for the sake of choosing the Lord.
Sometimes, as Peter discovered, our human self-interest and understanding stand in direct opposition to following Christ. And in those cases, I choose Christ. I choose love and loyalty over self-interest.
To deny myself in such situations is to surrender the right to do what I think is best and instead choose to trust Jesus and stay behind him, rather than plunking down on the path in front of him and attempting to block the way.
Take Up Your Cross
All by itself, such renunciation is powerful. It sets us free to do what we desire to do. But along with it, Jesus gives us a powerful armament: take up the cross.
What does this mean? It means to decide, right in this moment and from here on out, that I will follow Jesus even if it kills me. It is to prioritize this one desire, the desire to follow Jesus, so that it vetoes every impulse to do otherwise.
Like a soldier who makes a choice, on the day he enlists, to lay down his life one day if necessary, so we make up our minds that we will die on this cross if we’re asked to.
Taking up the cross, we carry it, every day: the ultimate symbol of trust in God and his ways, and of renunciation of our own understanding. When a voice inside begins screaming at us, “No! This shall never happen to you!” we can simply nod toward the cross on our shoulder and say, “Won’t it? I’ve already decided to go this way till the end.” And keep on going.
The cross on our backs becomes the ultimate safeguard of our decision to follow Jesus. Every little decision in keeping with this cross confirms in us and to us that we truly will walk this road. No compromise, no turning back.
When we choose to die at the outset, as the saying goes, we have nothing left to lose. In this is perfect freedom.
The Triumph of Desire
We should realize that in their original context, Jesus’s words were extremely literal. Recall again the conversation that had just happened between Jesus and Peter. Jesus predicted that he was about to be arrested and killed; Peter rebuked him for saying so.
But Jesus was right. He was going to die, literally, on a literal cross, and if his disciples wanted to come after him, they would have to do the same thing.
You might at this point wonder if even ardent desire could possibly be strong enough to enable such denial. Faced with an actual crucifixion, could our “want to” conceivably be strong enough to get through the horror and pain?
If you’ll excuse my jumping ahead, we know that in the disciples’ case, when the cross came to Jesus, they did not want to follow. At least, they didn’t want it badly enough to take a public stand and get arrested. Rather than take up a cross, Peter ran. Rather than deny himself, he denied Jesus.
It was the worst moment of his life.
Nevertheless, the time would come when Peter would take up a literal cross and follow Jesus to death by crucifixion. According to tradition, so would Andrew, Philip, and Nathaniel. The rest of the apostles died by various other bloody means, all in the course of carrying out the mission Jesus gave them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, most of whom didn’t want to hear it.
They died, in other words, “following Jesus.” Their preference for obedience wasn’t metaphorical. They really did what Jesus told them they would need to do.
Somewhere between Peter’s denial of Jesus and his death on a cross, he reconnected with his desire for God. And Jesus, who once blessed the hungry and thirsty with the promise that they would be filled, forgave Peter, cleansed him, and filled him with the Holy Spirit. When the test came again, Peter stood strong.
We can look at the apostles’ deaths from one angle and see terrible tragedy. But we can look at them from another angle and see incredible triumph. The disciples, initially so weak, confused, and afraid, ultimately did what they wanted to do. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, they followed Jesus, all the way to the end.
To Love Him More
In the centuries that followed, untold numbers of Christians have done the same. We call these Christians “martyrs,” from a Greek word that means “witness.” The church has always celebrated them. One of the great visions in John’s Revelation exults in them:
And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. (Revelation 12:10-11, ESV)
In several commentaries on Matthew 16, the Church Fathers noted the prominent place of free will in Jesus’s invitation. “If anyone wants to follow me.” His words open the door of discipleship to everyone, man and woman, rich and poor, slave and free. Anyone who desires may follow. The path is open to us all. Jesus dignifies our desire and makes it possible for us to carry it out.
Most of us don’t face literal crosses like Peter and Andrew did. Most of us have never even seen a cross since, thankfully, they went out of fashion as instruments of death and torture a long time ago. As most of the Western world converted to Christianity, it didn’t seem right to kill people on something that had become a symbol of the living Lord of Glory and his love for sinners. So we stopped crucifying people, and most of those who want to follow Jesus have to find another way to do it.
We may not be called upon to die for Christ. But we can certainly find ways to act on our desire for him. We can witness to his supremacy in our lives. We can put him first. We can deny ourselves and instead acknowledge him. We can take up our crosses. We can love him more than we love our own lives.
In doing so, we truly do follow the Lord. The desire we feel for God, and that Peter felt for God, is the same desire that empowered Jesus to deny himself in the garden of Gethsemane, when he prayed “Not my will but yours be done.” We are told in Hebrews 12:2 that Jesus was able to endure the cross because of the joy set before him. (Judas, by contrast to both Jesus and Peter, succumbed to despair.)
It is good to desire God. It is good to want him. We are blessed when we hunger and thirst, for we will be filled.
*Peter might very well have written this while reflecting on the words of Matthew 16!
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your care on Him, because He cares about you. (1 Peter 5:6-7)
If you derived some benefit from this blog, please consider leaving a tip. I’m grateful!
#
This is Part 250 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
#
I could not write this blog without the generosity of those who support it on a monthly basis. Thank you all so much! To become a supporter for any amount of your choosing, click here.
#
Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash
Leave a Reply