NOTES for Mat 16:24

Why does God need that a man should reject himself, his personality, for what does he need faceless? But He doesn’t ask us to reject our personality, but to renounce from our “self”. Personality as something unique manifests itself when we are in relation with others and the “self”, withdrawing into our personal interests makes us indistinguishable. We are all the same in arrogance! Jesus’ words about the cross are surprising. Now we put here our conceptions of some inconveniences in life. But this word couldn’t have such a meaning in Jesus time. The cross was a horrible and humiliating death, and nothing else. Therefore Christ’s words could only signify an invitation to agree suffering, death and shame. And what all this self-abnegation is for? Jesus says simply: “If anyone wishes to come after me”...

“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” Where the Russian text has “go,” the Greek text uses “ἐλθεῖν,” the aorist infinitive of “ἔρχομαι”—to go, to come. The literal meaning, then, is: whoever wishes to come after Me. This is not about simply walking somewhere behind Him, but about following Him to a definite goal. One can walk without any special effort or commitment, but if you want to follow Him all the way to the goal, then the conditions He sets come into force. These are Christ's own words about what we are to do.

Deny yourself. We can renounce only wealth that we possess or could potentially possess. It is impossible to renounce the process by which icebergs form in Antarctica. But the icebergs themselves—yes: what do I need them for? To renounce something means to give up claiming authority over it. It is impossible to renounce being a living human being. But it is possible to give up control over that person's life—your own life. To deny yourself means accepting as right and good not the aims and circumstances in life that please you, but those that God chooses to give you. For most of us this means first of all consenting to remain unnoticed and refusing to be guided by our own vanity or that of others.

Take up your cross. In the Gospel, the cross always names what happens when the divine comes into contact with this sinful world. When we sense hostility, we usually either run away or respond in kind—and often do both at once. Christ does neither. He accepts pain and suffering as the inevitable companions of love and innocence in a world stricken by sin. It follows, incidentally, that if you want to take up your cross, merely agreeing to do so is not enough. You too must acquire love for others and innocence; that is, you must stop doing evil and begin doing good.

And follow Me. Contrary to common opinion, eternal life cannot begin after death. It either begins here already or does not begin at all. Following Jesus can begin only in this life; otherwise it will be too late. For us human beings, the chief thing in this following is to seek God's guidance, to seek the rule of the Holy Spirit.

Christ's words about the soul, which is easy to lose but can also be saved, are sometimes understood in a somewhat spiritualistic way. People speak about the soul, meaning some immortal principle in a person which, if one cares too much about one's earthly life, is easy to lose, but which, if one gives it to Christ and follows Him by taking up one's cross, can be saved. Meanwhile, in the New Testament texts the word "soul" most often denotes not some immortal principle that survives the body and absolutely must be preserved whole because otherwise one will die completely, but the whole of life in all its fullness and in all its manifestations.

The problem here is not to preserve within oneself something special that cannot be lost under any circumstances, even at the cost of losing everything else, but to allow that stream of life which the Bible calls the soul to flow freely, so that it does not lose its fullness and depth. Here, of course, the person himself, his spiritual "I," plays an enormous role; in the Bible this is called the heart, and from it come those desires and aspirations that determine the course of a person's life.

In the Bible these aspirations and desires are usually called thoughts or intentions; what is meant here is not thoughts in the proper sense, as a modern reader sometimes thinks, but precisely intentions, strivings, and inclinations that determine a person's spiritual state, the flow of his life, and therefore his path. At all times, among all peoples, in all spiritual traditions, people seeking the path have tried to solve precisely this task, the task connected with the spiritual quality of their own life. In Yahwism, and later in Judaism, this path became the path of the inner Torah, rooted in the pre-exilic period, in the era of the preaching of the prophet Jeremiah.

This path, however, proved extremely difficult for a person, for the consequences of the fall had not disappeared; they hindered a person from attaining perfection. Jesus offers an extremely clear and simple option: give your life to Me, unite it with My life, and it will not perish; it will not only be preserved in all its fullness, but will also acquire an even greater fullness, one of which a person of the fallen world could not even dream. This is the Christian path: the same path of the inner Torah, walked in unity of life with the One who came to reveal to the world the living Torah in all its fullness.

Judging by the Savior's words, the question of the Kingdom is not religious, but fully a question of life. It is a question of life and death. Indeed, what is the use of gaining everything and losing one's life ("soul")? And in the fallen world the situation, as is clear, is exactly like this. In theory, everyone living on earth can gain the whole world into his own power. But he will not be able to keep his life in the fallen world; the day will come when, despite all the power available to a person, his own life will leave him, as water disappears into sand.

Such is the feature of the fallen world: it is impossible truly, essentially, to possess it; there is nothing in it that would allow a person to be in the full, spiritual sense of the word. It contains many things a person can get hold of, things that can be had. But there is nothing that would allow a person to be, to correspond to God's design for himself, and only correspondence to that design can allow a person to become himself in the true sense of those words. And like everything inauthentic, a person's imagined being in the fallen world finally turns into nonbeing - into the very thing that all being in a world torn away from its Creator is.

It is no wonder that all attempts to hold on to and preserve for oneself that pitiful likeness of life which is called by this word in the fallen world lead nowhere. The only way to survive is to share in another, real life, in the life of that Kingdom which the Savior brought into the world. Here there is no likeness, but real life in all its fullness. But one can receive it only by refusing to cling to the order of things to which the likeness of life belongs, the order by which we live in the fallen world. Otherwise it will not work. We are offered a voyage on a luxurious ocean liner, but to board it we have to let go of the plank we are holding now and which for a time lets us stay afloat.

And Jesus reminds His disciples of the life of the Kingdom, reminds them precisely when they are frightened and confused. For this new life is the Kingdom that He brought into the world. Therefore His resurrection becomes the triumph of the Kingdom. But the apostles will understand this only after His resurrection. For now, all that remains for them is bewilderment.

Not only many Pharisees, but even the apostles themselves did not understand their Teacher in everything. This, in fact, evidently explains Peter's reaction to Jesus' words about His coming death and resurrection. As for death and resurrection, the disciples never did understand Jesus, and only after His resurrection did the situation become somewhat clearer for them.

Evidently both Peter and the other apostles still held more or less traditional views of the Messiah and messiahship. And they did not understand at all how the Messiah could die. The issue here was not even that He would then rise from the dead - the apostles, like all their Jewish contemporaries, of course knew about the general resurrection on the day of Judgment. The issue was that the Messiah could not, must not die, because He was supposed to stand at the head of the messianic uprising in order afterward to lead the holy war for establishing the Kingdom of God on earth.

And when Peter says to Jesus, "May this never happen to You!" he is horrified not so much by death itself (after all, during the Last Supper he would speak with complete sincerity about his readiness to die beside the Teacher), as by the thought that Jesus' mission would turn out to have failed, that none of what he and the other apostles were waiting for would come about. Such a thing simply could not happen, because the Messiah is the one who carries out God's plans on earth; there can be no failure here. Failure is possible in only one case: if this Man is not the Messiah. But both Peter and the other apostles were afraid even to think of that.

That is why Jesus' words about His coming death and resurrection throw them into shock. But, as is clear, apart from Peter no one dared voice his fears and bewilderment aloud, perhaps fearing that he would hear the worst. All that remained was to follow the Teacher and see what would happen next.

We all went to school, and some of us even work there. We all know the logical sequence: give the right answer, get a top mark from the teacher and have your mother replace a visit to the dentist with a trip to the zoo. So after Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the words “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona” sound entirely natural to us. But then: “Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.” Even the thought of this frightens the disciples, and so Peter says, “This shall not be unto Thee!”

Confessing Jesus as the Son of God opens the way to our reward, but this reward is of a special kind: the opportunity to behold and experience the depth of God's mercy—a frightening depth. It is the opportunity to touch the hidden and ineffable nature of God's love: He gave His only-begotten Son so that the world might be saved through Him. In this depth there is an answer to every murmuring question we may ask, but we must accept Jesus as the Son of God and dare to hear His words.

For human beings this depth of mercy is always incomprehensible. The divine nature is impassible; the Almighty cannot suffer—such is the cry of Peter and the Jews, of Greek philosophers and Hellenized Christian theologians. The incarnate Son of God suffered for us in the flesh, and in horror we either say, like the Jews, that He is only flesh, or, like the Greeks, argue ourselves hoarse that He suffered in the flesh, only in the flesh, while the divine in Him remained impassible. But He Himself says: “Mine heart is turned within Me, My repentings are kindled together” (Hos. 11:8)—and therefore “He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things.”

The apostles do not understand Jesus at once. Peter, calling Him Christ, that is, the Anointed One, King of Israel, cannot take in His predictions of His own death in Jerusalem.

Do we understand what it means to be Christians? For us, Christianity is most often associated with a certain form of spiritual life, a particular worldview, particular behavior, particular rules of life. Does our "salvation of the soul" not contrast with the words about those who "want to save their soul (life)"? He does not speak about rules, about a worldview, about "Christian values." He speaks about the cross, about bearing the cross, as the mark of a Christian.

If this is hard for us to understand and take in, we should not despair; the apostles could not either. The only important thing is to move along the path of this awareness. And in order to move, we need to know the goal.

Today's reading tells us about Peter's confession (vv. 13-20), which is preceded by Jesus' conversations with the Pharisees about signs (vv. 1-4) and with the disciples about the "leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees" (vv. 5-12). It concludes with a description of Peter's conversation with Jesus, during which Jesus speaks rather sharply about His disciple (vv. 21-28).

The central event here is Peter's confession: he recognizes in Jesus the Messiah, the Christ promised by God, while the people considered Him a prophet (vv. 14-16). And then Jesus, confirming Peter's conclusion, says that he could understand this only through revelation from God (v. 17).

It would seem that the Messiah was expected not only by Jesus' disciples: in Gospel times, messianic expectation among the Jewish people was very intense. But the point is that Jesus least of all resembled the Messiah whom both the people and the learned rabbis expected. The people expected a Messiah-king who would free Judea from Roman rule; the learned rabbis and theologian-scribes wanted to see a Messiah who matched their theological theories. It is no accident that the Pharisees and Sadducees ask Jesus to show them one of those messianic signs by which, according to their own concepts, the Messiah alone could be recognized. And Jesus refuses - not, of course, because it was difficult for Him, but because He did not want to fit into any theological concept and had no intention of conforming to anyone's ideas. Accepting such a Messiah, one who matched no generally accepted norms or views, and in whom the majority were ready to see an ungodly man and a violator of the Torah rather than the Messiah, was truly possible only by revelation.

Soon after this, it was time for Peter and the other disciples to learn about the cross and the Resurrection (v. 21), and then it turned out that this knowledge was unbearable for a person. It was still possible to accept a persecuted and suffering Messiah, especially since the image of the suffering Messiah was well known to every believing Jew from the book of Isaiah. But to accept His complete defeat was utterly unthinkable, and death on the cross was perceived by Peter and the other apostles only as defeat. The reality of resurrection in general, and of Christ's Resurrection in particular, was still only a distant prospect for them, so that even when He had risen, they still could not fully believe it for a long time.

It is no surprise that Peter cannot come to terms with the thought that the Teacher's death is inevitable (v. 22). But Jesus is uncompromising here as well: one cannot stop halfway; one cannot accept the Messiah and refuse His path. A person who acts this way turns from a disciple into an adversary (v. 23). There is only one road into the Kingdom (vv. 24-27), and one can arrive there only by walking it to the end.