“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me will find it. What will it benefit a man if he gains the whole world yet loses his life? Or what will a man give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man is going to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will reward each according to what he has done.” (Matthew 16:24-27)
As a child, I thought Jesus’s invitation to self-denial meant that Jesus wanted me to make myself disappear somehow — to reject myself, my gifts, my will, and of course, my desires. Following Jesus probably meant never doing things I liked or was any good at, and it definitely meant never having a positive will of my own.
I saw my humanity as a problem that needed to be jettisoned; the call of God to me was to stop being me.
Thankfully, I was very wrong about all this. I had picked up pieces of quietism, gnosticism, and “total depravity” and blended them together into an unsustainable approach to discipleship that I never really practiced because it was awful and, frankly, it doesn’t work. God willed us into being as humans, and he neither calls nor wants us to behave in inhuman ways.
In hindsight, that should have been obvious to me even as a child. The call is to follow Jesus, to do as he did, and he clearly did not hold himself in contempt. He did not reject or negate any part of himself — not his divinity and not his humanity. Jesus was whole and secure in his identity. He who always delighted in the children of men (Proverbs 8:31) delighted in becoming a child of man.
For us too, following God — our Creator —does not entail ceasing to be ourselves. Jesus who created us did not come to abolish but to fulfill our being; he came to give us our lives.
And if we think that Jesus is calling us to lay down a “bad thing” (our selves, our lives) in this passage, we won’t understand it. The whole thing hinges on the goodness of life, and how natural and right it is to want to save it. Jesus tells us to follow him, even into death, in order to save our lives.
To follow Jesus, even to the extent of taking up a cross and dying on it, we must want to live. Jesus’s call is fueled by desire, and life is the reward he holds out.
Life Is Good
From the beginning of Scripture to its end, Life is held out as the great good. This is so because life comes from God; he is its source. Scripture opposes it to Death, which is the great evil, separation from God. To Live, finally, is to possess God. To Die is to be without him.
In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve traded access to the Tree of Life for the knowledge of good and evil. They devalued the greater good, relationship with God and the life it brings, for a path of self-reliance in disobedience to God.
From that time forward, every time he sent his word into the world — through the Law, through the prophets — God invited humans back into a relationship of trust with him that would bring them life. The Torah climaxes with just this declaration:
I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, love the LORD your God, obey Him, and remain faithful to Him. For He is your life, and He will prolong your life in the land the LORD swore to give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)
As the Word of God incarnate, Jesus issued the same call back to trust and relationship, and through it, back to life. When Jesus called his disciples to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and die, he was not saying something different from what the Law and Prophets had said. The call was still to choose life.
The point of disagreement between us humans and God is not the goal — we both agree that life is good and desirable. The disagreement is about the way to that goal.
Our natural human tendency tells us to spend our time getting our ducks in a row, looking out for ourselves, making sure before all else that we have what we need — growing, getting, and guarding. It’s that old garden path of self-reliance in distrust of God.
Jesus says that’s how we lose life. In a paradox that goes all the way back to Eden, when we let go of God to grasp at life in the way that seems best to us, it slips through our fingers every time. But when we are willing to let go of life, to trust ourselves and our concerns and our needs to God and to choose him first, we gain life along with him.
The Way of Love
Even understanding that, there’s a clear paradox in what Jesus says: die to live, lose your life to gain it. The key to this paradox, the thing that makes it all make sense, is love.
In all the words of this call to discipleship, Jesus makes it clear that life is the great good. But there is a greater still — love. Love possesses God fully; love is the key to life.
This, too, was clearly taught in the Torah. The same book of Deuteronomy that urged God’s people to “choose life” also commanded them to “love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Leviticus commanded Israel to “love your neighbor as yourself” and assured God’s people that those who kept the commandments of God, to love God and to love neighbor, would live by those commands (Leviticus 19:18, 18:5).
Under the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to finally and fully live out this call. In doing so, in loving God, we find eternal life.
Loving to Live
To love is to live. And since love asks us to give ourselves for the sake of another — and what lover doesn’t want to do exactly that? — to love is also to die. But this is a death that always leads to resurrection, since love, as Paul will tell us, never dies (1 Corinthians 13:8).
Ultimately, the self-denial Jesus is asking for isn’t self-negation; it’s love. It’s the kind of courage and denial humans are capable of when we live for something or someone beyond ourselves, when we care deeply, when we want something more than our own self-gratification.
To quote St. Augustine once more: “The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire.” Jesus would agree. Rather than negating desire, Jesus’s invitation foregrounds it. We are to follow this strongest desire, this strongest want — to fan these flames until we become a burning bush.
If it’s going to carry us the distance, our denial must be led by desire. And that desire must be for the greatest good. We are not told to desire the cross, to desire death, or to desire suffering. The call is much simpler and cleaner than that: “if anyone desires to come after Me.”
The object of desire, of love, is Jesus.
Jesus asks us to stop grasping at life and love him instead. If we follow him, he will do the preserving and protecting; he will make sure we are rewarded, that life awaits us at the end of the road.
He is honest that this road is sometimes very hard. It requires wholeheartedness. You won’t make it if you’re trying to play both sides, to preserve your life at the same time as you’re trying to give it. You can’t hold your hand open and keep it closed simultaneously.
His promise is clear: “Whoever loses his life because of Me will find it.” In embracing the cross, we embrace Eden. We discover that in strange disguise, the cross is the tree of life we once lost, and love is — and always has been — the way back home.
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This is Part 251 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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