Matthew 16:21–28
Then Jesus told His disciples, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.
The heart of the Christian life is following Jesus, not putting ourselves down. Discipleship has us reevaluate our values and commitments, as Christ calls us to put Him first in all things.
A woman told her pastor, “Whenever I hear this Bible passage, I smell potato soup.” She explained. When she was a teenager, her mother announced they were going to church for a “sacrificial supper.” It had something to do with the season of Lent. For this family, talking about Lent didn’t make much sense.
As they gathered one Sunday night in late winter, the Fellowship Hall was half-empty. The kitchen door opened and somebody brought out a pot of potato soup. It was white, pasty and smelled like onions. The teenager pushed the bowl aside and waited for the next course, which never arrived. It seemed like a cruel joke. The entire menu was potato soup. There was nothing else.
At the end of dinner, the pastor stood up and explained it was Lent, the season of self-denial. On a normal Sunday, he said, we would normally sit down to a large meal, but tonight, we’re giving up a fine dinner and choosing a simpler menu. The reason we were doing this, was because Christians are people who deny themselves, pick up a cross, and follow Jesus.
Does potato soup have anything to do with Christian discipleship? Maybe not. But there’s a strong connection to the text we have heard today. We hear it most often in the season of Lent. That’s the traditional time of preparation, a season to move toward the cross and prepare for the resurrection. There’s no question that self-denial is a central theme for Lent, which coincides with a bleak North American winter.
But when we probe deeper, we hear self-denial is central to the story of Jesus. In our Gospel text, Jesus tells His disciples He is going to suffer and die. This is the first time He has said it. The Jesus who saves will suffer. The One who confronts every kind of evil will be destroyed by evil. Jesus will deny Himself and pick up a cross. He chooses to save the world, even if it means losing His life.
Simon Peter doesn’t understand this. Who can blame him? It is difficult to hear. If anybody wants help from Jesus, they must remember how He endured suffering and rejection. Jesus didn’t swoop down from heaven ready to snatch us from the earth. Rather, He came down to earth and stayed until He was buried in the ground. Immediately before our text, as we heard last week, Peter makes his great confession: “Jesus, you’re the Messiah.” He was right as far as he was able to visualize at that moment. What Peter couldn’t yet understand was that Jesus would give His life as an act of self-denial. He took the low road all the way to the cross. That’s hard to keep focused. His sacrifice judges our perceptions of success and accomplishment.
Jesus says it plainly. “If any wish to come after Me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me.” The road Jesus took is the only road available for anyone who tags along behind Him. This goes against our selfish nature: deny yourself, take up your cross, follow Me.
His words sound harsh because we can easily take Him to mean that we should deprive ourselves of the glory of God, even to the point of denying our God-given dignity.
Jesus says, “Deny yourselves.” It’s difficult for some people to hear when they’ve had so much taken away. How can people in poverty believe it’s a virtue to give up what little dignity they have? How can the oppressed ever hear this word from Christ?
For those who struggle to feel empowered, for those who believe for the first time in their lives they are worthy of love and appreciation, it can be harsh to hear Jesus say, “Deny yourself.”
It helps to set these words within the entire context of Matthew’s Gospel. According to Matthew, Jesus comes to make a constructive difference in the world. Jesus confronts every destructive force that disturbs human life. God sends Him to teach about God’s grace and to give back dignity to all who have it taken away. For the person with leprosy segregated from the community by his disease, Jesus restores him to health and community. For the woman on the fringe of the town who suffers from a hemorrhage, she is healed and given a name. For the sinner who can’t undo the effects of his mistakes, Jesus cancels all his debts with God. Matthew tells us how Jesus comes to give worth and value, not take it away.
So, let’s rethink the order of those three imperatives: deny yourself, carry a cross, follow Me. Which comes first? Which is most important to God? We can deny ourselves, but as we know, we run the risk of ignoring our God-given dignity. We can go out looking for crosses to carry, repeatedly saying, “Hit me again.” Yet Jesus never says, “Go out into the world and get yourself beaten up!” (That’s not what He meant by turning the other cheek.) He says, “Follow Me.” In the Gospel of Matthew, that’s what matters. We’re invited to follow Jesus. We’re called for and called upon to follow Him. His invitation comes before every other claim on our lives.
Following Jesus means two things. First, we become His disciples. That means we put ourselves in the position to learn from Him. We give up the allusion that we are experts in leading our own lives. We change our personal agendas and learn from Jesus.
Second, if we follow Jesus, that means we’ll participate in the same work that Jesus has been doing, which is to say we will speak out against every mean spirit, we will feed the hungry and heal the sick, we will speak the truth, we will touch the untouchable, forgive the unforgivable and love the unlovable. We will do God’s work in the world, just like Jesus. That may not be easy for us, but we are denying ourselves and helping to carry the cross of Christ. And when we do that, we have every reason to expect that what happened to Him might happen to us.
The members of the early church weren’t called to suffer. They were called to preach the Gospel. Because of the confrontational nature of that calling, the world they confronted persecuted them to stop them. Suffering is the result of the call, not the call itself. What happened to Jesus, for the same reason it happened to Him, may happen to those acting and preaching in His name.
We don’t wake up every morning and say, “How am I going to let the world beat me up today?” But we’re called upon to get out of bed to ask, “How can I let the whole world know the life of Jesus is the hope of the world?”
Some of us may have thought those three commands had to stay in the same order that they appear in the Bible: Deny yourself, go looking for a cross, and then follow Jesus. But the emphasis moves in the other direction. The most important thing for us is to follow Jesus Christ, to learn from Him and to do His work. If the world hands us a cross, we shouldn’t expect anything different.
Jesus says, “Come, follow Me.” That doesn’t mean we will intentionally put ourselves in positions where we will be beaten up or killed. But it does mean we will take God more seriously than we take ourselves.
Self-denial is the sum of the Christian life. It is the heart of true piety, the basis of generous stewardship and the source of our helpfulness to our neighbors. Denying ourselves in this context means we hold back because we have put God’s purposes before our own. This spiritual discipline reduces our desire to possess, our hunger for power and our thirst for the approval of others. True self-denial is the foundation for a humble life of service. We put God’s ways before our own pursuits. We choose to follow Jesus and to do his work. Nothing else will come before it.
“Follow Me. Pick up your cross. Deny yourself.” Whether we hear these words in the winter of Lent or the dog days of summer, this is Christ’s invitation. We don’t give up our dignity, but we do take on the responsibility of faithfulness. We speak as Jesus speaks. We act as Jesus has come to act. And if a cross is given to us, we won’t carry it alone. Jesus Christ has carried His cross, for us and for all. He comes alongside us, for He is risen from the dead.