Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
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What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his life? Or what can a man give in exchange for his life?
For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.
(From the Gospel according to Matthew 16:21–27)
Thinking like God
Have you ever thought that God does not always treat us the same way? Often it seems that one day God holds our hand, and our relationship with Him goes wonderfully, and the next day it feels like He does not help us and seems to distance Himself from us… Jesus acted somewhat similarly with Peter, whom He first declared the “leader” of the apostles and the Teacher’s beloved friend, and shortly after called “Satan” and an opponent of God’s plan.
Basically, this is not very different from how we behave towards the Lord: one day we live joyfully, proud to be Christians and believe in Him, proclaiming that He is the Son of God and the Lord of our lives, and the next day we complain, demanding that He act according to our will… which is completely opposite to what we say in the “Our Father” prayer.
We behave exactly like Peter did, who enthusiastically acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, and soon after, stepping aside, rebuked Him, declaring disagreement with His behavior as the Messiah. Peter called Jesus aside, of course so others would not hear, or perhaps fearing to express what he really thought in front of everyone. Therefore, Peter’s action seems secretive, deceitful… just like the devil acts. Jesus understands this and immediately exposes him.
We should not imagine that this behavior of Peter diminishes his personality. I do not think that was the intention of the evangelist Matthew, who probably just wanted to help us understand one thing, namely, that often we and God are in different positions, walking parallel paths, traveling the same road, but not meeting.
Perhaps this is because we look at the things around us differently, or maybe because, as Jesus says to Peter, we think not according to God’s thoughts, but human thoughts. After all, this is self-evident: we are human and cannot expect our thinking to detach from our affairs. That would mean denying our essence, our nature!
But God thinks differently than we do: today He wants to explain to us that in His dream about humanity, it is foreseen that people would at least sometimes think as He does…
God has enough means for us to empathize with His thoughts and accept them as our own.
God has enough means for us to empathize with His thoughts and accept them as our own. The liturgy of the Word of this Sunday’s Mass gives us three such means: one for each reading.
In the first reading, the prophet Jeremiah speaks about his encounter with God as a painful, difficult experience, from which he often wanted to flee because he was tired of proclaiming to people an unpleasant and hard-to-accept word – God’s word, which only brought him discomfort. However, confronted with his desire to leave God, he feels that he cannot do without Him, feeling inside as if a burning fire is stuck in his bones, which cannot be contained. He feels, using his own strong expression, that God “enticed” him.
But sometimes God uses another method – encouragement, as the apostle Paul tells us in the second reading in his letter to the Romans: the mercy of God, which he experienced directly in his life, urges us to change our lives, to turn it into a sacrifice acceptable to God. First of all, he urges us to change our mindset, “so that we may discern God’s will – what is good, acceptable to Him, and perfect.”
Indeed, there is never a lack of moments when God reproaches us for not living according to God’s thought. Therefore, the Savior, as with Peter, points us to the place intended for us – to stand behind Him, to follow Him as good disciples, adhering not to our own, but to God’s mindset.
And God looks at everything this way: The Messiah is the Son of the Living God, but also the Son of Man, the Son of suffering humanity.
We want to have the Messiah, Christ, “the Son of the living God,” immortal and triumphant over His enemies, who can never suffer anything bad, by our side, but God looks at everything this way: The Messiah is the Son of the Living God, but also the Son of Man, the Son of suffering humanity, with whom He decided to share everything, even the cross, suffering, and death – the only path leading to the glory of the Resurrection.
Today’s Gospel answer is strict, brief, but very clear. Jesus, offering to go with Him, or more precisely, to follow Him, reminds us of the necessity to accept the cross.
True life according to God’s will is like love: you gain it, you give it, you give it away, you waste it for what is truly worth it. And is there anything in the world more valuable than God?…
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