A Wider Way
In last Sunday’s Gospel, Peter made a very important confession about Jesus. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus accepted Peter’s confession. In today’s Gospel, this same Peter receives a sharp rebuke from Jesus. Jesus tells his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, and be killed. When Peter hears this, he takes Jesus aside and tries to stop him. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Then Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.” These are very strong words.
Peter had been imagining a new future with Jesus. Crowds were following Jesus. The sick came looking for him. Peter must have felt proud to be known as one of his disciples. If the teacher rose, perhaps the disciples would rise with him. Now that teacher suddenly begins to speak about dying. For Peter, this meant losing someone he loved. It also meant watching the future he had counted on fall apart. His alarm is understandable. Jesus answers, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Peter did not want his teacher to die. He wanted someone he loved to be safe. There was nothing wrong with that desire itself. The trouble begins when that desire becomes the measure of everything, even the path Jesus must take. If Jesus was truly sent by God, surely he must not die. If this was truly the right path, surely it must not end in failure. None of this is foreign to us. Every living thing tries to protect itself. We want to avoid danger. We would rather gain something than lose it. The desire to protect ourselves is natural. Yet it cannot become the final measure of our lives. Is this good for me? Will this keep me safe? What might I lose? When these questions become too powerful, we begin to judge even the way of God by them.
Jesus then says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” These words are easily misunderstood. Deny yourself. Give up what you want. Let go of your own happiness and live only for others. If this is how we understand faith, an honest question arises. Can anyone really live that way for a lifetime? If I must keep giving up what brings me joy, where will I find joy at all? There may be an assumption hidden in that question: that my happiness and another person’s happiness are entirely separate. Real life does not work that way.
Parents give their time and money for their children. Sometimes they sleep less. Sometimes they put aside something they wanted to do. Yet we do not think of all this simply as a loss of our own happiness. That is because the joy of our children has already become part of our joy. When a child is happy, the parent is happy too. Parents do not count every effort they make for their children as a loss. Love redraws the line between ourselves and another person. It becomes difficult to divide clearly what is for me and what is for the other person.
This helps us hear the words “deny themselves” in a different way. It does not mean that I must erase myself. It means stepping down from the place where I believe I must be at the center of everything. Faith may not mean losing all concern for ourselves. It may be the process by which what we count as our own concern begins to change. Something that once seemed to belong only to someone else’s life no longer seems entirely separate from us. The joy and pain of people who once meant little to us slowly enter our own lives. In the end, what matters most may not be how much we have given up, but what we have come to love. When we begin to love what God loves, and when what mattered to Jesus begins to matter to us, faith is no longer an outside command forcing us to sacrifice ourselves.
If our faith does nothing more than protect us and those on our side, we need to stop and think. Faith may sound noble and holy. But if it serves only us and our own circle, we must ask whether it is truly the way of Jesus. Peter came to such a moment. There was no conflict when he confessed that Jesus was the Messiah. The conflict began when the path Peter expected and the path Jesus chose no longer matched. Peter could see only the road he already knew. Jesus was showing him a wider way.
We live within nations, cultures, and religious communities. They are precious to us. Yet the boundaries we create are not necessarily God’s final boundaries. We can see this in our own time. When the desire to protect “us” becomes too strong, we can easily overlook the suffering of “them.” Even now, people are dying in many parts of the world because the security of one nation or the interests of one group have been treated as absolute. At that moment, Peter’s world had also become small. His teacher must survive. Their community must not fall apart. Jesus was looking beyond those limits. And it is here that Jesus speaks about the cross.
For us today, the cross is a familiar religious symbol. In the time of Jesus, it was an instrument of death. A person condemned to crucifixion was sometimes made to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. So the command to take up the cross and follow was never a light or comforting one. The central point, however, is not suffering itself. Jesus did not desire the cross. He did not go looking for pain. What Jesus refused to abandon was the work of bringing life to others, reaching out to those who had been pushed aside, and proclaiming the kingdom of God. He followed that path to the end, and the cross was the result. The heart of the cross, then, is not suffering but following. As we follow Jesus, there will be moments when what we are holding on to comes into conflict with the path he is taking. At that moment, the cross is no longer a distant religious story. It enters our own lives.
Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” We hold tightly to many things because we want to protect ourselves. We want to protect our position, our security, and even our certainty that we are right. Yet a life held tightly is not necessarily a life kept safe. We can hold on to many things and still find that our lives have become smaller. Perhaps this is where we begin to understand the strange truth in Jesus’ words about losing and finding. When I step down from the place where I must be at the center of everything, I begin to see people whom I could not see before. What once seemed to be someone else’s concern no longer seems entirely separate from me. To take up our cross and follow Jesus is to cross that boundary with him. Along that way, we may lose something. But within that loss, we receive a wider and fuller life.
Amen.