Matthew's Gospel has up to now had one point of focus: the recognition of Jesus as the Son of God. The point at which that focus is finally sharp and clear is reached with Peter so confessing Him. From then on it has another point of focus: the achievement of the Son of God in the Cross and the Resurrection.
Who Jesus is, first; what Jesus did, second; His Person, then His Work.
From this point on the Gospel is structured so as to move toward the climax of Calvary and the Empty Tomb. Jesus moves through the Cross to the Crown, through crucifixion to coronation.
Jesus concentrates on the disciples now. They must learn two things none find it easy to learn:
1. How His Sonship is to be manifested - the Son goes to His Cross.
2. What it will mean to 'confess Him' - the disciple must take up his cross.
It is not easy to see God in the humiliation and defeat of the Cross. It runs against the grain of our thinking. We think to see Him manifested in glory; instead He presents Himself in shame and disgrace. We look for a show of strength and power to reveal Him; instead we are presented with Him in a state of utter weakness. We expect to see Him triumphing over His enemies; instead we see Him in defeat. It is not in glory, might and triumph God is perceived but in shame, weakness and defeat.
It is hardly surprising that from this point on in the gospel, the disciples are persistently represented as being obtuse, even blind to the truth about their Master. They simply cannot see it. We have the benefit of hindsight which they did not have. Even so, I wonder if we pay more lip service than life service to the truth Matthew now unfolds. We still want to measure the progress of the gospel, and our own, by success. It does not come easy to us to believe that real progress may best be revealed in what looks for all the world like defeat. We want everything to go well; when it goes badly, we wonder where we are going wrong. But we may not be going wrong at all; we may be going absolutely right. The right path is a path that leads to the Cross. "It is the way the Master went; should not the servant tread it still?" We all agree ... until there is nothing in front of us but a cross, and then we are bewildered, and offended.
The Cross is an offence. The Bible never makes any bones about it. As Paul said, "To Greeks it is sheer nonsense; to Jews it is an absolute stumbling-block. Only to those who are 'called' is it the power of God, and the wisdom of God." (I Cor 1:23-24) How we see it is the real test of whether we are 'called.'
There are brands of Christianity about which are success-orientated: all the emphasis is on healing and deliverance, triumph, joy and glory and a cheerful ease of progress. Of course there is a sense in which that is right; it is to heal and deliver us and lead us to victory, joy and glory that Jesus came. But where the crunch comes is in the way we conceive the healing, deliverance, victory, joy and glory to come. It does not come easy: it comes hard ... so hard it is the death of us. We have to go to the Cross. And we do not want to. We are exactly like Peter. He resisted the idea. He protested. All this talk of death and dying ... it was not fitting, not right. But his protest earned him a severe rebuke; and the rebuke was that in protesting that way he was being hostile to God. He was being an "adversary," for in the thing Jesus said, "Get thee behind me, Satan," that is what the word 'Satan' means. He did not think he was. He thought that by protesting, he was on God's side: "God forbid, Lord. This shall never happen to You." But Jesus said that when he held that attitude he had gone over to the enemy's side. An unwillingness to suffer will put us at enmity with God. To resist suffering is to oppose Christ.
It is hard to swallow. Whose side are we on? We think we are on God's side, but we want to side-step the Cross. Jesus says "You can't do that. You can't! If you want to be 'on side' with Me, there has to be found in you a willingness to suffer." (When Jesus said, "Get thee behind me ..." did He mean, "Fall into step behind Me," rather than "Get out of My way."? I would like to think so; unfortunately, I doubt if Jesus would have said that to Satan!)
What did He mean when He said, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up His Cross (Luke remembers that He added "daily," Luke 9:23) and follow me"?
When He said that, there was lacking any developed theology of atonement in the disciples' minds; they had no idea as yet of the meaning the Cross would have when Jesus went to His. What was not lacking though were crucifixions. Jesus Himself, and some at least of the disciples who were with Him that day at Cæsarea Philippi, would remember from their own childhood the sight of 2,000 crucifixions lining the Galilee road up to Nazareth. It was the reprisal the Romans took against those who had joined an armed uprising under the leadership of one, Judas. What the disciples understood Jesus that day to mean by 'taking up your cross' was crucifixion as He and they had, all too wretchedly often, witnessed it. Jesus did, after all, intend to be understood there and then. When Matthew wrote this, much later, believers could link it up in their minds with the Cross to which Jesus went, but when Jesus actually said it the disciples could not.
What He meant was plain enough to them; there was nothing cryptic about it. They all knew what a terrible last journey it was that a man took when he shouldered the cross-beam to the place of his execution. A man was on a one-way trip when he took up his cross. He had no more 'life of his own' left to him. Whatever more than this the Cross might mean for Jesus Himself, it did at least mean this, even for Him. A man who goes to the Cross has said a final, last farewell to any life of his own. And there is no going back on it; you are not in a position to change your mind about it half-way to the gibbet.
What Jesus meant was, "Life must hold nothing in the world for you but the journey you take with Me." For no-one who walks that path is called on to walk it alone. He will have the blessed companionship of the Son of God as he walks it, and he will walk it into the freedom of resurrection life. But we must not let that weaken the uncompromising demand it makes on us: we really do have to lay our lives on the line; we really do have to 'sell out' 100% to Jesus Christ. He said it is the only way to survive. If you don't you'll die. We think we'll die if we do!
It is a paradox. But that paradox contains the whole secret of life: the only way to live is to die. Men have been looking for the elixir of life all through the world's history. Here it is! This is it. The secret of life is to give it up ... to partnership with the Son of God, mind you; but really to give it up, nonetheless. The dilemma we all face is much worse than we imagine: if we reject Christ, we send Him to His Cross; if we accept Him, we take up His Cross. There are no other alternatives.
Looking after No.1, serving our own best interests to find happiness is a huge and monstrous lie. It lures us to death. "Whoever would save his life shall lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it."
So what have we lost? What have we yielded up? And what have we kept? What are we clinging on to? Jesus says that what we have to yield up is our very self. The word translated 'life' or 'soul' in our Bibles means that. There is no way we can give what it is He asks of us but by giving up our very selves, whole and entire; nothing left over to can hang on to, no little corner of the universe anywhere we can call our own, no place to go but to the Cross with Him.
We whittle away the demand ... with talk of 'moderation in all things,' and 'keeping a sensible balance.' All double-talk. To be sure, there is a sort of extremism to which we can fall prey which is not the thing Jesus is talking about at all: the death-or-glory syndrome that leads some to make extravagant sacrifices, and waste God-given resources with a reckless and irresponsible abandon. That is not the same thing as 'taking up the Cross' at all; it is, rather, a childish and silly bid for personal distinction.
When a man does what Jesus calls on us here to do, nothing may change outwardly in his life at all. He may still own a car and a house and make regular contributions to a superannuation fund. But in his heart, he has taken his hands off all these things. He possesses them because they are God's gifts to him, God's provision of equipment with which to serve Him, and not, therefore, to be foolishly squandered. He possesses these things still, but they do not possess him - not any longer, and not at all. He is entirely willing for them to be taken from him without notice and not be dismayed. To quote Paul, "Let those who have wives live as those who do not have a wife, and those who mourn as those who mourn not, and those who rejoice as those who rejoice not, and those who buy as though they gained nothing thereby, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it." (I Cor. 7:30) What Jesus calls for (and what Paul gave Him) was a radical inward detachment from all things in this world, our own self-improvement included, and a radical attachment to the Person of the Son of God so that He is all we really have. Our whole life is altogether wrapped up in Him.
When it is, we shall understand that the way of suffering and loss is the only way to go with Him, because when we look at the Cross in the light of His acceptance of it, we know that His willing acceptance of "the contradiction of sinners against Himself" while He loved them and remained vulnerable to their wounding is the only way love can win its way. That is why the Son of God goes to His Cross; and that is why His disciples must go to it with Him. It is that Cross they go to with Him: the Cross where love suffers evil to save others' lives rather than do evil to save its own.
There are three elements in going to the Cross the way Jesus went to His: in the strength of His Spirit: we say "No" to sin, we say "Yes" to God, and we live in love to men.
Disciples must understand this or they will turn into Sauls of Tarsus, who could see in the Cross only a total repudiation of Christ by God.
We are to "die with Him." The phrase means, "To be the way Jesus was when He came to die." It means to imbibe the attitude of mind and heart we see to be His in the way He came to die. What we see in Jesus as we ponder the story of the way He came to die is that ...
1. He resisted sin, choosing to die rather than yield to it;
2. He obeyed God, choosing to die rather than yield up that obedience, and
3. He yielded up His life out of love to men.
His resistance to sin, His obedience to God and His love to men - all three - made it impossible for Him to follow any other course than accept death, and so He willingly submitted to it. That was His 'baptism' - His spiritual baptism. More than once, He so referred to it. (Mark 10:38, Luke 12:50) And when we are called to "reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 6:11), what is meant is a share in that. By our companionship with Christ and His with us, and the faith it inspires, we draw from Him the attitude toward sin that was His, we draw from Him the attitude toward God that was His, and we draw from Him the attitude toward our fellows that was His. His 'mind' (to use another New Testament phrase) is conveyed to us.
This is the real crunch in the whole business of being a Christian. It is not 'way out'; it is altogether practical and down-to-earth. It will lead us to take decisions like the one Paul commended to the Corinthians in I Cor 6. The Christians in that congregation were suing one another in the public courts: "getting justice," "maintaining their rights." And Paul wrote, "Do you not see that to have lawsuits at all with one another is defeat for you? That is not the way love succeeds. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? You are wronging and defrauding each other by demanding your rights that way. If you win, you have lost - lost your truly Christian soul."
It is that sort of insight that led Jesus to go on to say, "The Son of Man is to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will repay every man for what he has done." (v. 27) For if what we have done we did out of self-interest and not out of love, it will perish in the fire. If there are no deeds of love that can be reckoned to us, there is nothing of us left that can survive love's pure flame; we ourselves will perish with the pile of rubbish which is all we shall have accumulated through a life-time of living.
This material is copyright; it may not be quoted, published or reproduced without the author's permission, nor preached without acknowledgment!