Worth the Commitment
In fewer than ten verses at the heart of Matthew chapter 16, Jesus reveals three essential components of his identity and mission. First, he affirms that he is the Messiah, then explains how he must suffer and die, and finally offers instructions to those who seek to follow him. These densely packed verses form a coherent whole, but that coherence is somewhat obscured by the lectionary division of the passage in two, with one half heard last week and the second just now. The connections between the two were referenced last week by our esteemed Canon Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, who noted that Peter’s declaration of Jesus as the Messiah tells us not only about the identity of Christ, but also our identity as those who follow him. Today, I would like to continue on this theme, exploring how knowing Christ as the Messiah is the foundation for understanding who we are as disciples.
This crucial section of Matthew’s Gospel begins, as we heard last week, with Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is. Peter offers the bold response, “you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus, in reply, calls Peter the rock on which he will build his church. The passage culminating in that declaration is triumphant and celebratory as Peter, the representative of the twelve, displays a rare moment of recognition and clarity. The text that follows immediately after, however, strikes a decidedly different tone, as Jesus explains the implications of that identity both for himself and his followers. He tells his disciples that as the Messiah, he must go to Jerusalem, where he will suffer, be killed, and be raised on the third day. Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection are inextricably linked with his identity as the Son of the living God, the identity that Peter had so confidently recognized just a few verses prior.
Peter’s role and mindset, however, change as quickly as the tenor of the text from clarity to confusion, Peter the rock becoming Peter the stumbling block. In a memorable exchange, he takes Jesus aside and rebukes him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord, this must never happen to you.” We might understand Peter’s actions as either an expression of his love for Jesus and a sincere desire that such terrible things should not happen, or as an indication that he truly did not understand yet what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah, or perhaps a mix of the two. Whatever was Peter’s motivation, Jesus offers a firm and seemingly harsh reply: “Get behind me, Satan!” Peter, who had just been praised as the rock on which the church would be built, must surely have felt the sting of that rebuke. In addressing Peter as Satan, Jesus uses the same words that he had previously used to address the devil at the end of his temptation account earlier in Matthew. Like Satan in the desert, Peter has, even if inadvertently, put before Jesus something other than the will of God, “setting [his] mind not on divine things, but on human things.”
Jesus so swiftly rebukes Peter because in attempting to spare Jesus of suffering and death, Peter misses what is at the core of the mission of the Messiah and by extension, his own mission as one of his disciples. Following this proclamation of his impending suffering and death, Jesus states plainly the implications of it for his disciples. Those who wish to follow him must “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow [him].” As Jesus gave himself up for the life of the world and literally carried his own cross, the instrument of his painful death, all the way to the Place of the Skull, so too are we his disciples to follow in this way of self-giving. It is no doubt quite a demanding task, one that might seem perhaps abstract and difficult to envision precisely how it might be lived out. A helpful starting point can be found in looking to the example of those saints who have gone before us and whose lives manifest a remarkable holiness and dedication to God. The disciple so prominently featured in this passage serves as a fitting example with which to begin. Despite all his failures, despite even betraying and denying the Lord, Peter became a courageous leader of the early church and, as an ancient tradition tells us, was eventually crucified, enduring the same painful death as our Lord and truly sharing in his sufferings as a disciple.
Peter is but one, admittedly quite prominent, example of a saint from the early Christian period, a remarkable time in Christian history and one that I find so alluring because it is seemingly so different from our own age yet, at the same time so filled with wisdom. The first four or so centuries after the resurrection were a time when people willingly and sometimes enthusiastically suffered and died for their faith, becoming martyrs, giving their lives as a witness to the Lord. It was a time when perfectly well respecting people abandoned all their possessions, left behind their old lives, never looked back, and went into the desert to dedicate all their time to prayer and meditating on the mysteries of God. It was a time when still others decided to devote their lives to prayer and fasting by living the remainder of their days in solitude, atop tall pillars perched on tiny platforms at the pinnacle of these columns. This sort of behavior seems unusual, perhaps even bizarre, to the modern sensibility, to say the least. Yet, in reading the stories of these saints, from what seems a strange and distant time, I find in them an inspiring and appealing fervor and desire to live truly as disciples. While I would not exactly emulate their methods, I do seek to embody in my own life even a small portion of that devotion and commitment to following the Lord.
These saints of the early church, indeed the saints of all generations, inspire us because they model with such completeness and clarity what it means to be disciples, to follow Jesus with all their being, to find that pearl of great value, and to pursue it with all they have. In short, they show us how to live in a way that puts what’s most important at the center. Humans of every generation, those of the first centuries of Christianity no less than our own, are confronted with such questions as, “how am I supposed to live this life given to me?” “how do I find meaning in it?” “what is it that truly motivates me and gives my life purpose?” It is surprisingly easy to move through life without asking ourselves such basic and essential questions. It can be so easy simply to follow a path that has been put before us, advancing in a career that is familiar or comfortable or stable, following the path that was expected of us or modeled for us, working through the daily, weekly and monthly rhythms of just doing what needs to be done in order to survive, only to look up one day from these regular rhythms of life and find ourselves with a lingering sense of emptiness at our core. We might have economic stability, respectable employment, all the things that society seems to say we should desire yet we still find ourselves asking questions like, “what am I truly living for?” “what makes my life meaningful?” “is all of this stuff bringing me genuine joy and contentment?”
Jesus himself alludes to such questions when he asks, “what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” Wealth, material possessions, the things of this world can only offer us fleeting and incomplete satisfaction. The abiding contentment that our soul seeks is found only in God, in following his ways and giving up our lives to his service. “For those who want to save their life will lose it. And those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” This is the paradox of discipleship, the logic that goes against all that the world tells us. To follow Jesus requires that we deny ourselves and take up the cross, to give up what is seemingly significant to gain what is actually of greatest value and importance. As a collect from the Prayer Book so aptly puts it, “O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom.” Serving God is indeed perfect freedom. Giving up our lives is the means of finding it. This paradox of discipleship is memorably articulated in the beloved and perhaps familiar prayer attributed to Saint Francis, “it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
The concrete reality of this life of discipleship is expressed in a uniquely powerful way by Saint Paul in today’s passage from the letter to the Romans. It is a text so rich, so infused with wisdom that we would do well to keep it close at hand and come back frequently to it, to meditate on its teaching. Grounding everything in love and the pursuit of all that is good, Saint Paul expresses the most essential elements of Christian living in these commands: love one another, rejoice in hope, persevere in prayer, be patient in suffering, bless those who persecute you, exult with those who are joyful, weep with those who are broken hearted, live in harmony and peace with everyone, if it is at all possible, be humble, and above all, do not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good.
The beauty of the text is only matched by the difficulty of heeding its instructions, most of which contrast so sharply with how the world tells us to behave, or how we might be naturally inclined to act. Those who truly live out these instructions, then, are such extraordinary witnesses to a different way of being, to the way of life shown to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave his disciples the new commandment to love one another, who always went about doing good, who did not retaliate against those who persecuted and killed him, but rather prayed to the Father from the cross to forgive them, who gave himself a ransom, that we might have life. That is the way of the cross, the path we are called to follow, that is, as another collect from the Prayer Book puts it, “none other than the way of life and peace.”
As disciples of Jesus Christ, our identity and mission are founded on who he is and what he has done for us. He suffered, died, and was raised so that we might have life, and all who seek to follow him must take up that same way of the cross, denying ourselves and letting him become all in all. The paradox of discipleship, however, is that in denying ourselves and sharing in his sufferings, we actually gain what is of immeasurable value and find what satisfies the deep longings of the soul, as we follow the source of all life and find perfect freedom in serving the Lord of love. That is surely something worth committing our lives to. “Take up your cross and follow me,” Jesus says. Let us heed his call and offer to him with the Father and the Holy Spirit, our lives and all praise, worship, and honor now and forevermore. Amen.