Main news for 5 December 2024

The Savior's words, "whoever wants to follow Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me," give us astonishingly concrete instructions. The meaning of His words only seems hard for us to understand. The reason is that it is hard to want to fulfill them.

The experience of life among people, which every person has, gives us an inner knowledge of what it means to deny oneself. It means living not for the sake of your own interests, or any other exalted interests, and not giving others your time and strength as though you were doing them a great favor. It means that another person's need for you, for your help, for your attention, is more important than your needs for anything else. It means that people not only give you an opportunity for humility, but imperiously and harshly demand it, extending their claims to rule right to the very center of your personality.

To accept this for Christ's sake is what it means to take up your cross. The human heart knows all this. At times we even have to act according to this commandment, because there is no other way to build healthy relationships with people. But this happiness turns out to be so painful that it is very hard to agree to it for the sake of the Crucified One.

"If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me." What does it mean to deny oneself? After all, it would seem that our selfhood, our personhood, is the only thing that belongs to us directly, the thing we deal with every minute; to part with it is something unthinkable. We receive an answer to this question in the Letter to the Galatians (Gal 2:16-20). At some point the awareness comes that "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." But it comes only after the long ascetic labor of renouncing one's own will, nourished by a burning desire to become like Christ in everything. And the chief way we can become like Him is to ascend the cross, our own cross.

Yet it would be wrong to think that our personhood is indifferent to the Lord, or that He could want to level out our selfhood. When it is said that God will be all in all, it means that this "all," in which God will be "all," remains in its own identity; otherwise one could simply say that God will be all. But while remaining unique, it will have no place within itself for anything opposed to God or fighting against God. Everything will be directed toward God, not away from Him.

And the beginning of this is laid down already now. We must clearly understand what an "adulterous generation" is and consciously separate ourselves from it. Most of all, we must bear witness to our faith before it. At times it feels better to keep silent somewhere so as not to start arguments... but that is always betrayal.

Messianic expectations in Gospel times assumed that the Messiah would lead a movement of His supporters that would end in His complete victory over all enemies and in the restoration of an independent Jewish state, which was to become the foundation of the messianic Kingdom.

It was assumed that God would intervene and support His Chosen One if anything went wrong. Of course, this meant a completely real, physical war, during which the Messiah was also in real danger of dying, but it was assumed that God would not allow that. Of course, the Messiah could suffer in some way during the messianic war, but He could not die, because then His mission would remain unfulfilled. Jesus' disciples shared these expectations too; after all, they were people of their time.

It is no accident that in response to the Savior's words about His death, Peter begins to argue with Him. He was sure that the Teacher's death meant the end, the failure, the collapse not only of their own expectations but also of God's plan, and that was already completely impossible. Jesus Himself had just confirmed that He was the Messiah, so He could not die; that simply could not be. Yet He speaks about His death as something not only possible but directly inevitable.

How could all this be understood and brought together? Jesus, of course, knows perfectly well that all those truths about His death and resurrection that seem self-evident to us today in fact do not fit at all into the consciousness of fallen humanity. They seem self-evident to us today only because they are widely accepted and therefore familiar. That is why He begins the conversation about what true life is and what it is like. Without understanding these basic things, without grasping them, a conversation about death and resurrection - not only of the Messiah but of any person at all - becomes quite meaningless.

Jesus reminds His disciples that life, the "soul," is not the property of an individual person, not his possession. Life is given to a person by God as the stream into which the person is immersed and in which he remains, while that stream also dwells mysteriously within the person. The body is only the outer and passing shell of the stream of life, but to fallen humanity it seems as though the person preserves life in his own body as in a vessel, and if the vessel is broken, life will disappear, spill out, and run away like water into sand.

In reality, death and the destruction of the body are only a transformation, provided, of course, that a person is not truly trying to hold back the stream of life, stop it, and seal it inside his own physical body. In that case, in trying to save his life, or "soul," a person truly loses everything. But if he gives up such attempts, he can receive the life of the Kingdom in all the fullness available to him, like that inexhaustible river of living water of which the prophets spoke.