TEXT:
Calling the crowd to Him with His disciples, [Jesus] said to them, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis in the closing days of World War II, wrote a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. He states the theme of his book in this one very simple and pointed statement: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” Considering Bonhoeffer’s future fate, some have described this statement as ironic or even prophetic. But any Christian ought to be able to make the same statement. It should come as no surprise to us that Christians who are faithful to their Lord and Savior in the face of persecution are putting their lives on the line. Jesus Himself warned us about persecution when He said to His disciples: “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor Me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you” (John 16:2-4).
Today we observe the Confession of Saint Peter. Peter is a very interesting character in the Gospels. In fact, in my opinion at least, he is the most interesting of the twelve apostles. In the Gospels he is shown at his very best and strongest, boldly confessing Jesus to be the Messiah of God, and also at his very worst, three times denying with an oath that he knew Jesus at all. In some passages (like this morning’s Gospel) we see both sides of Peter at the same time. After boldly confessing to Jesus: “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29), he objects to the Savior’s prediction of His coming suffering and death, only to have Jesus rebuke him the strongest terms, even going so far as to attribute Peter’s words to Satan himself. I find Peter to be so interesting because He is a lot like us: sometimes good and strong; at other times weak and not so good. As we, like Peter, confess and follow Christ in a world that makes this difficult, we consider especially the honesty and leadership of this Savior who we confess and follow.
No one could ever accuse Jesus of calling disciples under false pretenses. He is brutally honest about what being His disciple entails. He first of all makes it clear that discipleship is obedience. “If you love Me,” He says, “you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15). Jesus is either everything to you or He is nothing. He insists on being the Number One Priority in your life, and He is not at all timid or ambiguous about that. After calling His disciples He told them: “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37, 38). To a would-be follower who first wanted to bid farewell to his family Jesus said: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). And one who would follow as soon as he buried his father was told: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead (Luke 9:60).
Jesus is equally honest in making it clear that discipleship is self-denial. And self-denial is not just a matter of depriving yourself of various luxuries; it is a total denial of self and is, in fact, a death to self. In Matthew’s version of the text before us Jesus makes the statement: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). When Jesus says in our text: “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me,“ He is making it clear that the Christian life is no “bowl of cherries,” as they say. What a contrast this is to what we hear from the preachers of prosperity and self-affirmation that we see on television. Loyalty to Christ and bearing one’s cross always go hand in hand. To be a disciple and confessor of Jesus Christ is to subordinate yourself and your own interests to Him--to be able to say with the apostle Paul: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Dying to self is not easy, but it makes possible the New Life that Jesus has won for us by His perfect life and sacrificial death, confirmed for us by His glorious resurrection from the dead, and given to us by the power of His Holy Spirit in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism.
The demands that Jesus makes of those who would follow Him carry a lot of weight when you bear in mind that He Himself leads the way for those who He calls. He doesn’t ask His followers to do anything that He isn’t willing to do Himself. As a matter of fact, He doesn’t ask His followers to do anything that He hasn’t already done. In other words, Jesus has every right to ask us to bear the cross because He bore it first--and He bore it for us. This is the mark of a true leader. When He calls us to a life of self-denial and self-sacrifice, He knows better than anyone what that entails because He is the One “who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). He Himself set the pattern for the kind of attitude and life to which He calls us.
What He did not only inspires and justifies us; it validates us. Saint Paul writes to the Colossians: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church” (Colossians 1:24). In speaking of “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24), the apostle does not mean to imply that there is anything insufficient about the Savior’s suffering and death, nor is he saying that our afflictions in any way contribute to our (or anyone else’s) justification before God. He is simply saying that Christ’s sufferings are not yet complete because when His people suffer, He suffers with them. Because of our union with Him in Baptism, our afflictions are, in a sense, absorbed into His. In this way He joins us in the afflictions that we endure because of our faith in Him and our public confession of that faith, validating our suffering as if it were His own.
We know that in this world “talk is cheap,” as they say. Nowhere is this more obvious than in confessing Jesus Christ as God and Savior. Seventy-three percent of the people in this country still claim to be Christian, but less than twenty percent of these people actually practice the religion that they claim as their own in terms of regular public worship. We have no reason to believe that the statistics are any better in terms of these people studying God’s Word, engaging in personal prayer, or actually allowing their so-called faith to inform and influence their day-to-day life and decisions. That’s quite an indictment when you consider how many Christians through the centuries and even today have and are bearing the cross and following Jesus. But the Good News is that there is forgiveness and New Life for all of us through the blood-stained cross and empty tomb of Jesus as He leads the way through suffering and on to glory for those who are His.
Amen.
May the God who caused light to shine out of darkness cause you to increase and abound in love toward one another and toward all people, as His love abounds for us; and may the glory of His Son be manifested to you and in you, that you may be witnesses to all nations now and until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.