NOTES for Mar 8:36-37

Having revealed to the disciples the mystery of His path, Jesus begins a conversation essential for each of us: what part does a person have in God's design?

It is very important not to forget that our salvation was bought at just such a high price, the death of the Son of God on the cross, and this places very serious obligations on us. In the abstract this looks beautiful, but what does it mean in practice? In the Gospel of Matthew (Matt 25:31-46), Christ gives a very clear practical interpretation of it: what we do to someone else, we do to Him Himself.

And this is already very difficult. When we see suffering -- a poor person asking for alms, a gravely ill child or adult, a person without a roof over his head -- the first and simplest reaction is fear. We are afraid to be near a suffering person because we cannot shut ourselves off from it, because we begin to suffer with him. All the more so because such situations very often seem hopeless; sometimes we really cannot change the circumstances. Then the simple way out seems to be guarding our inner well-being, our peace of soul, and fleeing from the suffering of others; and this is very understandable in human terms.

Yet Jesus calls each of us to let what is divine, not merely human, prevail in us: not our common human fear of suffering, but His love and mercy, which can make us ourselves participants in the mystery of the salvation of the world.

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.

Peter's confession is a very important moment in the whole Gospel, because here there is an astonishing manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who descends upon a person and speaks through his lips. Yet for all the divine inspiration of this scene, it is at the same time astonishingly human, astonishingly alive. It looks like an impulse of the soul. But at the same time it could not have been merely an impulse of the soul, because these are the words on which the Church is built. This is Revelation.

In biblical culture, however, we are used to revelations of a completely different kind, complex and full of symbolism. And yet the brief and simple words of Peter's confession are also revelation, also a kind of apocalypse, because in the words "You are the Christ" there is the recognition that what is happening all around is the end, the fulfillment of the times. For here He is, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

The special significance of this text is also shown by the fact that these words, having become a prayer, are heard at the most trembling moment of the Liturgy. "When at the end of the Liturgy the priest comes out of the Royal Doors with the Holy Chalice, we all together - both the clergy and the laypeople taking part in the service - read the prayer composed in the fourth century by John Chrysostom: "I believe, O Lord, and confess that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first..."," as Fr. Georgy Chistyakov writes in his book "Over the Lines of the New Testament."

If we are bound to Christ by faith and love - and all His disciples are called to this - then the question, "Who do you say that I am?" in a certain sense means, "Who do you say that you are?" For as Jesus is, so His disciples must be; Christians are named from Christ. And here lies our saddest gap between theory and practice. We believe that He was incarnate and became Man for our sake, while we ourselves cannot and do not want to draw nearer to those whom we call our "neighbors." We say that He died on the cross for the sins of humanity, while we ourselves "do not want to lift a finger" for much more modest goals. We teach that He rose from the dead, but we continue to live an old, unenlightened, unresurrected life. Yes indeed, for such Christianity one could well earn the name "apostate," "Satan." Following the example of the apostles, it is time for us, most of whom consider our faith the most correct, to begin bringing our life into conformity with our faith.