Our reading from
Matthew for tonight is one of the less comfortable scriptures we have.
First, Jesus tells the disciples that he’s going to be killed. Then,
Jesus tells the disciples they need to be willing to follow him completely,
wherever following him leads, even if it leads to death.
It
was an uncomfortable thing for the disciples to hear, too. When Jesus
told them that he was going to be arrested and killed, Peter’s response was
“God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” He did not
want to hear it. This was not the way he thought things were supposed to
go. We’re not told about the response of the other disciples, but I think
we can pretty safely assume that they agreed with Peter. They wanted
Jesus to establish God’s kingdom on earth. That Jesus was going to be
killed would’ve been the last thing they wanted to hear.
Jesus
gets pretty upset with Peter. He says to Peter, “Get behind me,
Satan.” That must have made Peter feel pretty small, don’t you
think? To have Jesus call him “Satan”? I mean, Peter thought he was
Jesus closest friend. And really, in his mind, Peter was trying to help
Jesus by saying what he said. To have Jesus chew him out like this, in
front of everybody, had to make Peter feel pretty bad.
That’s the part of this story we tend to remember, when
Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan”. But that’s not necessarily the most
important part of this. Equally important, at least, is the next
sentence, when he explains why Peter has things messed up. He says to
Peter, “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human
concerns.”
The
Bible leaves that scene there, and then goes on to Jesus talking to all the
disciples again. He tells them, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must
deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants
to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find
it.”
We’re
not told what the Peter’s reaction to this was, nor are we told the reaction of
any of the other disciples. I’ll bet they did not like hearing this
either, though. They knew, of course, what “take up their cross”
meant. It meant they had to be willing to be crucified. I suspect
that, when Jesus called them and they became disciples, none of them realized
they were signing up for that.
They may have
known they were in for some tough times, of course. They may have even
known they would have to fight and risk death. But they were confident
that they were going to win. After all, they were following the Messiah,
and their whole idea of a Messiah was that the Messiah was going to be the
conquering king. This idea that Jesus was going to give up his life on
earth, and that if they wanted to follow Jesus they each had to be willing to
give up their lives on earth, too, was not how the game plan was supposed to
go. It was not what they’d signed up for at all.
And
you know, when we hear these words, we don’t really like them very much,
either. After all, Jesus did not just mean these words to apply to the
disciples; he meant them to apply to us, too. He said, “whoever wants
to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
We
do want to be Jesus’ disciples, or at least we say we do. I wonder, though,
when we decide to follow Jesus, if we really realize what we’re signing up
for. How many of us, when we decided to become Christians, thought about
having to give up our lives to follow Jesus?
What
we sometimes do, when we get to this point in the discussion, is to talk about
giving up our lives to follow Jesus as something that only exists for us in
theory. We talk about the Christian persecutions of the past. We
may even talk about places in the world where, right now, Christians can be
killed for their faith. We don’t think about having to give our lives to
follow Jesus as something that could actually happen to us.
And
the fact is, that’s probably true. We talked last week about how, even
here, we could get into trouble for our faith. But as long as we live our
lives here in rural South Dakota, the chances are that won’t have to give up
our physical lives because of our faith in Christ.
The thing is,
though, that Jesus was talking about more than that. He said that, to
really be his followers, we need to be willing to deny ourselves and follow
him. When we became Christians, is that what we thought we were signing
up for? Did we realize that we would have to deny ourselves to follow
Jesus?
Now,
in asking that question, let me recognize that I know that there are a lot of
people who have done and are doing a lot for this church. People who’ve
taken time and effort to do things that you did not have to do. There
have been times when it would have been much easier for you to go somewhere
else, to do other things, or to just stay home and relax, and instead you gave
your time and your effort to the church. I know that, and I appreciate
it. I don’t want this to be taken as me saying that nobody here does
anything, because I know that’s not true. There are a lot of people here
who do a lot.
Even
so, though, we all have the tendency to do what Jesus said Peter was
doing. We all have the tendency to set our mind on human concerns instead
of on the concerns of God.
And
I do, too. You know why? Because I really enjoy the human concerns
I set my mind on. I like them. They give me pleasure. I don’t
want to give them up.
The
thing is that those human concerns are not necessarily bad things. They
can be, but not necessarily. It’s not a bad thing to enjoy sports, for
example. It’s not a bad thing to like music. It’s not a bad thing
to enjoy visiting with people. None of those are bad things. In
fact, some of them would be considered good things. They can be bad,
though, if we set our minds on them too much. They can be bad if we value
them so much that they get in the way of following Jesus.
There’s
nothing wrong with enjoying our lives, but we can put too much emphasis on
it. If our lives on earth become too important to us, we run the risk of
doing what Jesus warned the disciples about: wanting so much to save our
earthly lives that we risk losing our eternal lives.
Now,
I am not saying that we cannot ever do anything we enjoy while we’re on
earth. God gave us a beautiful world, and God wants us to enjoy it.
It would be a pretty cruel God who gave us life and created all this beauty and
then said, “Now don’t you go enjoying any of this. Don’t you ever have
any fun while you’re on earth” I don’t think that’s how it works at all.
There
is an inherent danger in saying that, though. What Jesus is warning about
is enjoying things for their own sake, and enjoying life for its own
sake. God wants us to enjoy our lives on earth--but God wants us to enjoy
them in ways that show love to God. God wants us to enjoy them in ways
that serve God. Our minds may at first be on human things, but we can
still find ways to move them toward divine things.
See,
here’s the thing: we cannot be someone we’re not. I cannot stop
being a sports fan; it’s part of who I am. I cannot stop liking music;
it’s part of who I am. God created each of us with likes and dislikes,
with various talents and abilities. When Jesus told us to deny ourselves,
he did not mean that we should deny who we are, because that would be to not be
the people God created us to be.
God created us
each of us with those likes and dislikes, with those talents and abilities, for
a reason. We’re expected to use them in God’s service. If we keep
the things we enjoy to ourselves, if we use our talents and abilities
selfishly, then we’re setting our minds on human things and failing to deny
ourselves. On the other hand, if we find a way to use the things we enjoy
to serve God and others, if we use our talents and abilities to serve God and
others, then we’re setting our minds on divine things.
It’s
kind of ironic, when you think about it. Jesus told us to deny ourselves
and follow him. Yet, it’s only by denying ourselves that we can become
the people God created us to be. In other words, it’s only by denying
ourselves that we can truly become ourselves; not the selfish selves that we’re
sometimes tempted to be, but the Christian selves that we want to be and that
we can be.
When we hear Jesus tell us to deny ourselves
and follow him, we don’t want to hear it. It scares us. It does not
sound like what we signed up for when we became Christians.
The
truth is that for most of us it’s probably not what we thought we signed up
for. The good news, though, is this: it’s something better.
There is no greater feeling than the feeling we have when, even if just for a
moment, we feel that we are where God wants us to be and are doing what God
wants us to do. When we deny ourselves, and follow Jesus, we truly become
what God intends us to be. Then, we can have that great feeling, not just
for a moment, but for always.
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