Date: September 3, 2023
Festival: 14th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17)
Text: Matthew 16:21-28
Preaching Occasion: Zion Lutheran Church, Mt. Pleasant, MI, and CTKLC
Appointed Scriptures: Jeremiah 15:15-21; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28
Sermon Hymn: LSB #531 Hail, Thou Once Despised Jesus
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
When you teach someone how to do something, or you’re their mentor, parent, or something else to that effect, what does that relationship usually look like? It usually looks like them doing the things you do or doing what you say. As they follow you, their life begins to look a lot like yours as they grow in their apprenticeship, or hobby, or as they mature as your child. When they make a mistake, you gently correct them because you made the same mistakes. When they’re negligent, you rebuke the and show them the right way. When they struggle, either your or somebody else you’re teaching helps them along the way.
For example, I started playing the saxophone when I was 8-years-old. Like most 4th graders, we were learning how to read and play music on those cheap, plastic recorders. I started playing the sax because I grew up watching my dad play the sax and the piano in the Christian rock bands he was in, and I wanted to be just like my dad. So, I asked him to teach me how to play and he brought out his old, decrepit alto and showed me how to put it together, the importance of wetting the reed, and how to blow into the instrument. At this point, I already knew how to read music, and the majority of the recorder’s fingerings are the same on the saxophone, so I started playing right away. I have no idea where my parents found the patience because I hadn’t learnt how to articulate with my tongue yet, so I was doing it with my throat, so I sounded like a goose being bludgeoned to death.
But by middle school, my dad signed me up for private lessons and my tone and skills improved—I was much more bearable to listen to. The more I played and learnt from my instructor, the more I developed his mannerisms while playing, I developed the same annotations to make on my music that he used, the same alternate fingerings, and other things. I became a young Irv Feldman—that was his name. One of the most important things he taught me as an up-and-coming musician was to deny my bad habits, for example, bad practicing habits. Most musicians—especially young musicians—make the mistake of practicing what you already know how to play, or what’s fun to play. That’s not practicing. True practicing is playing over and over again what you’re not so good at until you get it down perfectly. You might begin with just a single measure, and once you get that down you go back one measure to get into the one you just perfected until you can play the entire phrase without any mistakes, and then, of course, the whole piece.
He was a good teacher too because when I didn’t practice, although he was irritated, he forgave me. But he corrected my bad habits, and I had to deny my self-pleasures as I followed him. And like every serious musician, I had to suffer. I have a permanent scar on the inside of my bottom lip because of the thousands of hours I’ve spent practicing, and I had to suffer the opportunity to do other things so I could practice and get better. And it was all worth it because it led to my first professional career as an Army musician.
I tell you that story because it is a small picture of what it looks like to pick up your cross and follow Jesus. As He challenges us in today’s Gospel lesson, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” To avoid any confusion, Jesus is not calling for “super Christians” to weed out all the weaklings. Rather, He is informing people who are already His disciples what following Him will look like—what discipleship looks like. It is the job description, so to speak, of what it looks like to be Christian. Being a Christian looks like Jesus carrying His cross—that is, it looks like a life of hardship and suffering. Not that we never have moments of joy and peace or that we seek out suffering, but that suffering is the norm of the Christian life, not an aberration. As He says in John’s Gospel, “In the world you will have tribulation” [16:33a].
Last week, we heard the bold confession from Peter, which was revealed to him not by the flesh but from the Father through the Holy Spirit, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” Then, not too long after this, Peter does a complete 180 and says something that belongs to “the things of men,” that is, the world. As we read, “Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” What Peter says when Jesus tells them these things reveals a pattern in all of us. Peter expresses the common view of the Jews of his time—that the Messiah suffers and dies is like oil and water. The two simply do not belong together. Rather, the Messiah should come in power and might and glory to overthrow Rome!
This pattern continues in all of us. All of us at some point in our lives have wondered, “Why doesn’t God just come and destroy evil and suffering right now?” God, we think, should just get rid of suffering and evil not through His own suffering but through His might and power. As Jesus responds to Peter, this is not godly thinking but satanic thinking, which really began during Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. If you recall, during His time in the desert, the devil tried luring Jesus into a path of claiming power and glory for Himself. Jesus’ final reply was, “Begone, Satan!” And now, when Peter denies the path of suffering and death as any part of God’s plan for Jesus but rather should be one of power and glory, Jesus speaks to Peter in much of the same way, “Begone, Satan!” God, in Christ, has elected to reveal His plan of salvation from suffering and evil not in power, might, and glory but in hardship and suffering. To put it another way, God has elected to deal with suffering not by destroying it outright with His might and power—at least in a manner that’s obvious to us—but by being present with us in our suffering. To demand that God deal with suffering and evil in any other way than the cross of Christ is, like Peter, to engage in satanic thinking, for only the devil does not want Christ to atone for our sins and suffering in His cross.
And so, Jesus calls His disciples—you and me—that if we are to follow Him, our lives will look like His Passion—to bear our cross, which is a life of hardship and suffering. Just as He denied Himself power, so He calls you and me to self-denial. There are two tendencies Jesus calls us to deny. The first is the tendency to think—and even insist—that God deal with evil and suffering according to our own way of doing things, which is power and success. If God is truly good, we think, then He wouldn’t continue to allow evil to happen. He would come right now and destroy all evil. But that is our way of doing things, not God’s way. So, to deny ourselves means not to assume or believe that God’s way of doing things in the world will conform to our expectations and demands of success, efficiency, or glory.
The second tendency we all have is to exert our power over others. Husbands want their wives to be good Christian wives, so they’ll tell them, “You need to submit to me because that’s what the Bible says,” but submission is a free act of the will like how Christ freely submits to the Father; and the husband is supposed to act like Christ for her, not a tyrant. Some children suffer abuse from their parents because they want absolute control over their kids. A mother will abort her own child because she wants to exert power over the baby and her own body, or she might be forced into an abortion because her boyfriend or parents or whomever want to control the situation.
Every child disobeys their parents because they want to exert power over them. Young and old both give themselves over to sex outside of marriage and adultery because they want control over their own bodies. There is political division because both sides want power and control over the masses. The Left wants control by dividing people by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, vaccine status, and any other way they can divide people into groups so they can justify having a government to control all those groups. That’s how you get a totalitarian State. The Right wants the individual to have independent control, even if it means disregarding the needs of your neighbour, such as immigrants. Even in the Church, we might think, “Put me in charge, and I’ll set things right.” So, we gossip about people behind their backs to try and gain leverage over them, perhaps in the attempt to place ourselves in a position of power.
But Jesus calls us to deny these two tendencies—to deny our way of doing things over God’s way of doing things and to deny our addiction to control and power. By commanding us to pick up our cross and follow Him, Jesus is instead calling us to a life of humble obedience and submission to Somebody else’s will that’s different than ours. Again, this is not a prerequisite to following Christ; it is simply the way of following Him. He calls us to look at the darkness within and to deny its desires. As a result of this self-denial, we do become susceptible to various kinds of attack, shame, and harm just like Jesus was when He bore His cross. What this looks like will vary from person to person.
It might look like losing your job because you refuse to capitulate to the world’s ways of doing things and the harmful things they want to teach your children in school. Maybe it looks like your teacher or your professor embarrassing and belittling you in front of the whole class because of your Christian beliefs or getting a bad grade because of what you believe. Maybe it looks like going to prison because you teach marriage is only between a man and a woman and there are only two genders, or even being sued into poverty for the same reason. Maybe it might even look like martyrdom. The point of picking up your cross and following Jesus is not to calculate in advance what exactly it’ll look like but to relinquish all control every single day to the One who has set the controls to the heart of the universe.
If you don’t like the idea of denying yourself, it might sound like Jesus is approving of self-harm, because if you’re denying yourself pleasures, that must mean it’s harmful because you suffer when you don’t get what you want! But Jesus is not approving of self-harm here. It’s best to think of it like addiction, and we are all addicts; we are all addicted to sin. And each of us have our particularly favourite sin substances. One addict might be addicted to alcohol while another is addicted to meth. One person might be addicted to breaking the 8th Commandment while another is addicted to breaking the 3rd Commandment. If an addict wants to get sober, he must deny the pleasures his addiction offers him. If he doesn’t, he’ll only continue to get more and more addicted until he kills himself. The first step of any 12-step programme is to admit you have a problem. In biblical terms, he must deny himself, admit he has no control over his addiction, and relinquish all control to God. Every addict gets addicted because he wants control over some pain in his life; he thinks he has control but in reality, he has none.
As true addicts to sin, all of us are tempted to seize control and power over our lives because we want to protect ourselves from pain, which is suffering; in other words, we want to save our own lives. But Jesus says this is to lose everything. The desire to save ourselves through our own power and control leads us to killing ourselves with unbelief. Paradoxically, to lose your life—which means to relinquish all control and power over to Christ in complete trust—is to find life, indeed, eternal life. Even if you should save your life by your own control and power and in so doing you gain the entire world, it wouldn’t do you any good because you would still lose your life, and you’d therefore have nothing left to give. Only by losing your life to Jesus can you save it, for only Jesus can give life from death, which He shows by His own cross.
On the cross, Jesus reveals the way of following Him—of being His disciple. Yes, there will be hardship and suffering, but there is also the joy of the Lord that no sermon can describe for you. Most importantly, there is life and salvation; for as He revealed to the disciples, He would not only be killed by the powers of the world but also rise on the third day. Since we suffer hardship like Christ did by carrying our own crosses—however that may look—this means we also have the same end, which is resurrection from the dead. That’s why Paul writes in Romans 6, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by Baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Now listen closely, “For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” [vv. 3-6].
In your Baptism, you have been crucified with Christ, and your Baptism is precisely where bearing your cross began—some of you as babies, some of you as adults or teenagers. Luther described the Christian life as “a daily baptism” because the Christian life begins on that day and continues for the rest of our lives. Every day, we purge whatever belongs to the Old Adam—or our “old self” as Paul put it—like envy, pride, greed, wrath, and so on, in other words, denying ourselves [LC IV, 65]. This also looks different for everyone.
Denying yourself looks like coming to the Divine Service instead of sleeping in to receive Christ’s Word and Sacraments, which give you the forgiveness of sins and strengthen you as you bear your cross in this hostile world, through which the Spirit helps you to deny your favourite sins. So, if you’re tempted to look at pornography, you deny suggestion movies and TV shows that tempt you to look at it, maybe even use computer software like Covenant Eyes. If you’re tempted to have sex before marriage, you either make things very clear with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you’re waiting until marriage or you break up with them, denying yourself that sinful pleasure. If watching the news makes you wrathful or fearful, you deny yourself the news. If sports cause you to miss church or your child to miss Confirmation class, you deny yourself sports. If you like to gossip about others, you deny yourself that selfish pleasure by removing yourself from the situation. Notice how the Ten Commandments teach us how to deny ourselves and to love God and neighbour.
Denying yourself might also look like whatever Bible reading plan you use, or whatever Bible studies you go to. It also looks like receiving comfort and strength from your Christian brethren or your pastor when your cross becomes too heavy to bear—someone who helps you carry your cross much like Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus carry His.
In these ways and more, you not only see how you deny yourself as you follow Jesus, but even more you see the starkly different way in which Jesus deals with your suffering. Worldly thinking—which is satanic thinking—wants Jesus to exert His power and control to deal with evil and suffering on their own terms; and there is a time when He will destroy evil, but it’ll never come at anyone’s insistence. Rather, Jesus shows you He deals with your suffering by His cross, meaning He deals with your suffering by being with you in your suffering. By His own mystery, Christ has resolved to dealing with your suffering not by coming in power and might (at least not yet), and certainly not by ignoring it, but by being with you in His Word, His Sacraments, and communion with the saints.
Remember this whenever you pray, “Thy kingdom come,” and “Deliver us from evil.” For when you pray these two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, you are p raying to the Lord who bore His cross, and you are praying for Him to be with you as you bear your own cross. If you recall from the catechism, “God’s kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead godly lives here in time and there in eternity.” You received the Holy Spirit when you were baptised, you continue to receive Him whenever you hear or read God’s Word and believe it, when you repent of your failure to deny yourself and receive forgiveness, and whenever the Spirit leads you to live a godly life by helping you deny your selfish pleasures and therefore relinquish everything to Christ, because He bore it all on the cross.
Finally, God delivers you from evil whenever He rescues you from every evil of body and soul—like surviving a surgery, or a severe illness, or from anxiety and depression, and giving you forgiveness of sins in His Word and Sacraments. And when the time comes when you don’t survive the weight of your cross, just like Christ died on His, “when [your] last hour comes, [He] gives [you] a blessed end, and graciously takes [you] from this valley of sorrow to Himself in Heaven” until that Day Christ does return to raise you from the dead in the new creation, and it will all have been worth it because, in Paul’s words, “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” [2 Cor. 4:17].
Until then, may the cross of Christ, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
The Lutheran Column 