Thursday after Ash Wednesday, March 3, 2022

Luke 9:22-25

Jesus said to his disciples: “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”  Then he said to all, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”

According to St. Luke’s chronology, these words of Jesus come after Peter has confessed that Jesus is “the Christ of God”.  The participle that opens the first verse of this reading (which is omitted from the lectionary translation) connects the verses that make up this reading with the Lord’s response to what Peter has declared.  Thus, Peter answers the Lord that he is “the Christ of God” and then the Lord orders them not to make this known to anyone else.  According to the Greek, by way of a reason for this he says, “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”  That is, to announce that Jesus is the Son of God to the crowds would raise their hopes for the reestablishment of Israel, which the Lord did not intend to do.  His coming Passion and Death would then make it appear to them that they had been deceived.  The crowds were not ready to hear that Jesus was the Son of God.  Much preparation remained to be done first.  The Apostles, on the other hand, at that time had a need to know what the Lord would undergo.  

The Lord seems also to have told them that he would suffer and die in order to test their resolve to follow him.  We can surmise this because of what he tells the crowd directly after he has spoken apart to the Apostles.  He says, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”  The Greek word translated here as “deny” can also mean “repudiate”.  This gives us a sense of the hardness of this saying.  It is an astonishing thing to say.  It would have been enough to drive people away from him, leaving them to demand, “Who does he think he is?”  No mere teacher or philosopher or military or political leader had a right to say such a thing.  How does this carpenter from Galilee say this?  And yet, for the Apostles who believe that he is the Christ of God, what he says makes perfect sense.  “He must take up his cross.”  The Lord speaks simply and directly about what his prospective follower has to do.  He also hints that he himself will carry a cross, for the follower does what he sees his master doing.  We can understand this daily “cross” as our mortality or as the persecution or hardship we suffer, after our Lord, in living the life he commands us to live.

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”  We lose our life for the sake of Jesus when we prefer his will to our own, no matter what he might will for us.  He wills for the sinner to become virtuous, and the virtuous to become perfect.  But he defines perfection, not us.  We note that he says, “for my sake”.  To follow him entails carrying a cross for his sake and of losing our lives for his sake.  “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”  “Gaining the whole world” means to live as though not needing God.  It is a rejection — of God, for the world belongs to him.  The one who “gains the whole world” is deluded, then, and will suffer eternal frustration: losing or “forfeiting” himself.

The Lord offers us a clear choice: God or self, life or death, glory or disaster.