Choose Salvation and not just Safety
I will not lie to you. I will not paint a rosy picture of what’s in store for every Christian who desires to live up to his or her name. The truth is simply this: being a Christian is really hard. So much easier to go with the flow, to fit in, to accommodate and follow how the world thinks, and does things. Try to go against the flow, and you would most likely get hit or be thrown under the bus. It is Venerable Fulton Sheen who tells us, “Today the current is against us. And today the mood of the world is, ‘Go with the world, go with the spirit.’” But the good bishop reminds us that “dead bodies float downstream. Only live bodies resist the current.”
This is the dilemma faced by St Peter in the gospel. To choose safety over risking losing everything. To either flee from the cross or embrace it. Peter chose safety over risk, flight over fight, and he will repeat this mistake at the very end of the gospel story when his Master gets arrested. What made his cowardice more pronounced in today’s passage is that he is trying to convince the Lord to do the same.
Just last week, Peter identified Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God; and the Lord announced that God had revealed this truth to him. On that basis, our Lord called Peter a “rock”, and promised to use him as a foundation to build His Church. Jesus even conferred the keys of the kingdom, a symbol of His authority on Peter. But this week, the mood changes. Peter’s rock melts and becomes jelly. What happened? Our Lord predicts and discloses to His disciples that He must suffer greatly, be rejected by the religious authorities, and be killed before rising from the dead. There is no glory without the cross. It’s confounding and downright frightening.
Peter then takes our Lord aside and tries to remonstrate with Him. We would imagine that Peter is being respectful and does not wish to challenge the Lord in front of the others. But the phrase “taking Him aside” has a more profound nuance. The phrase is more accurately translated “took possession,” as in the case of a demoniac possession, taking control of a person’s will and rendering him powerless. This is the action of the diabolical. This is what Satan attempted to do at the beginning of the gospel when he took our Lord aside and tempted Him with various paths that will lead our Lord away from His mission and the Cross. Peter now stands in the place of Satan and does the same. Peter is an obstacle to our Lord’s mission and tries to convince Him to abandon the means by which our Lord will achieve His mission by proposing a safer way, one which requires little sacrifice, one which has nothing to do with the cross.
But our Lord clarifies, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.” It’s the cross which will define the disciple, not just the ability to do good deeds or spout correct doctrinal statements about Christ or God.
This is the lesson the apostles and all followers of Jesus would have to learn. When we cling tightly to life and comfort in this world, when we prioritise safety over salvation, we risk losing out on the real life God desires to give us. Peter, out of misguided love, proposed exactly that. Jesus had to correct him, out of true love, and call him back to allegiance to God’s way. As the apostles would soon learn, the path to glory, for Jesus and for us, must pass through Calvary, it cannot avoid the Cross. To avoid the cross would be to stand in the way of Jesus. Our place as His disciples, is to follow Him from behind, not stand in His way. And the crosses that we carry are not proof of God’s absence or powerlessness, but where God’s power can be found.
Real Christians embrace the cross. They don’t flee from it, give excuses for it, or find softer substitutes for it. Renouncing oneself and taking up one’s cross is more than giving up something. It’s not like your little Friday or Lenten sacrifice where you deny yourself chocolate or alcohol or sugar or coffee – basically anything that makes life pleasurable. Denying yourself isn’t an invitation to a private spirituality. It isn’t a form of spiritual masochism. No. It’s a call to live in God’s way, even at the cost of death. As our Holy Father, Pope Francis, reminds us, “There is no negotiating with the cross: one either embraces it or rejects it.”
Being a Christian is hard, but it has its rewards. In fact, the reward for being aligned to God’s ways instead of man’s ways, is far more precious and valuable than anything we can hope to possess and achieve in this life. When our Lord gives us a promise, better believe in it, especially when the going gets tough, when you feel all alone and alienated in your struggle to be faithful, when you are hit on all sides by those who will try to convince you that you are wrong. And this is what He promises, “For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and, when he does, he will reward each one according to his behaviour.”
