He Gave Them a Cross (Part Two)

He Gave Them a Meal (Part One) He Gave Them the Spirit (Part Three)

Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!” Matthew 16.21-22

Why such a fierce response to Jesus’ claim? Sentimentality: Peter could not bear the thought of losing a friend? Messianic expectation: Jesus the true Messiah could not, should not possibly die? Or, as N. T. Wright notes in his book Simply Jesus, because the disciples then (as so many of us today) wanted a kingdom without a cross?

Just moments before in Matthew’s Gospel, Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah. Delighted, Jesus affirms his divinely inspired insight. Yet just as quickly, Jesus rebukes Peter for rejecting the predetermined way of the cross as the means for establishing the kingdom. The ‘son of man’ would not march on Jerusalem to retake it by force as her rightful king. On the contrary, much to the disciples’ surprise (and dismay), the way of the kingdom would be through the cross. And if that was not enough to take in, Jesus sets the way of the cross before his disciples.

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

There’s no two ways about it, the cross represented death. Jesus’ ultimatum to his disciples to take up their cross remains for us today an invitation (to put it kindly) to deny selfish means and gains for the sake of the kingdom.

“Somehow,” Wright notes, “Jesus’ death was seen by Jesus himself … as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.”

When as his disciples we take up our cross, lay aside our own agendas and follow him we declare daily that God’s kingdom has come, is coming, will come on earth as it is in heaven. The accusation over Jesus’ head, “King of the Jews,” transformed Jesus’ cross into a throne. The disciples did not foresee a suffering Messiah, but that is what they got. And as our King took up his cross so he expects his disciples to do the same. The way of the cross demands everything. And the disciples soon learned that taking up their cross and following him would indeed cost them everything.

Yet here is the clincher – the cross, although a powerful symbol of death also becomes the means to life.

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 

Indeed, to embrace the cross is to accept not only the way of death but also the hope of resurrection. The cross, forever a reminder of how Jesus died also becomes a startling testimony that death could not hold him.

Jesus gave his disciples a meal to explain his impending death. He gave them a cross to express the exacting cost of living for the kingdom. But in just a few weeks time, he will give them the Spirit … stayed tuned.

Matthew 16.13-26. See also Mark 8.27-38; Luke 9.18-26

N. T. Wright, Simply Jesus, Harper Collins: 2011, Kindle Edition