Daily Reflection Memorial of Saint Clare, Virgin

Today’s gospel passage concludes Matthew 16. It is immediately preceded by Jesus telling Peter, “Get behind me Satan,” after Peter had so greatly balked at Jesus’ prediction of his death and is followed immediately by the Transfiguration that begins chapter 17 and occurred six days afterwards. It is a good placement for these rather central teachings of the Lord we hear today. For Jesus’ execution does not fit at all with either Peter’s understanding of Jesus or his hopes for his own discipleship. Jesus then reveals himself to Peter and the other two Apostles in his Transfiguration in order to help them abandon all their preconceived and vain ideas of what he was calling them to, which was simply something they had never even dreamed of.

Jesus tells his disciples (and all of us), “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” This is followed by what can be retranslated as, lose yourself and you will find yourself. For we must admit that we are just like Peter, James and John and the other apostles. We too have all kinds of ideas about who Jesus is and what he is calling us to. Much of that, we must admit, is a romanticized, even sentimentalized understanding. But Jesus is quite clear about what following him truly means and he tells us plainly here. 

First, it is to deny our very selves. This implies a dying to our “self” as he states clearly in John 12:24, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” The self is really all we know of ourselves. It is our conscious awareness of both ourselves as well as the world, everything else being quite hidden from us. To deny this then, even put it to a kind of death, takes great faith and courage for it is to abandon all we know or think we know into God’s hands. The self will resist such efforts with all its strength, make no mistake. Thus, it can only be done by God’s grace. But we can find the willingness to allow God to accomplish this in us (which is also through God’s grace), but it is to go somewhere we have never been before.

Then it is to take up our cross. What, though, does Jesus mean by “your cross” here? The easiest way I know of as a way of explanation is that Jesus invites us to come to simply accept, even embrace (as he did his own cross) everything that happens to us, without question and without resistance. Everything and everyone. Forget, at least for now, about all those romantic notions we may have of ministry, be they helping the poor, the sick, prisoners or whatever. Those are, of course, noble efforts but until we achieve this acceptance, we are in the same vain ideas of it all as Peter and the other disciples were before the resurrection and Pentecost. It remains what we want or think we want. To truly die to the self is to abandon any thoughts of what we want. To truly take up our cross is to take up the one God gives us, not the one we may imagine, no matter how lofty it may appear. Start practicing this simple radical acceptance and you will quickly gain insight into what taking up your cross actually means and how powerless we are to do that on our own (let alone going off to convert the heathen or rescue the poor!).

Then we would be ready to actually follow Jesus. As 1Jn 2:6 so memorably tells us, “Whoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk just as he walked.” That means to do and desire only what we call God’s will and to love one another as he loved us (the Lord’s final commandment in Jn 13:34). It is to be meek and humble of heart as Jesus told us he was (Mt 11:28-30). It is to find God in all things not only in the things we happen to like.

Make no mistake, if we were able to actually ask Jesus what more we could do, as the Rich Young Man did, we too would go away sad just as he did because it would be nothing like what we had imagined. But remember, Jesus looked at the young man with love (Mk 10:21) before he told him what made him so sad (and shocked). That is how Jesus will look at us too for he knows how weak and foolish we are, how vain and often superficial we can be. That is not what matters. That is but a given. What matters is, are we willing to let Jesus show us how to lose our very self? Are we willing to go into that dark valley with him at our side? It is nothing less than a journey into our deepest fears. But on the other side of that dark valley, we will find that other place within us, the place only Jesus can take us to, where we “will fear no evil” and where “only goodness and kindness will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever!”