Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever
wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow
me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses
his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain
the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange
for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father's
glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct."
Truly, I say to you, there are some
standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in
his kingdom.
Matthew
16: 24-28
This passage has all the hallmarks of
being a series of remembrances of things Jesus said at different times and in response
to different circumstances combined into a single speech:
Whoever wishes
to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.
Christians often use this passage to bemoan
the “cross” of being Christian. Certainly,
historically, being a Christian was sometimes a real cross. But for nearly everyone
reading this blog, being a Christian has never been the equivalent of brutal crucifixion.
In fact, at worst, it is a wash. So what
was Jesus saying?
I am gradually coming to the conclusion
that Jesus’s teachings* can be grouped into two categories that appear without
distinction from one another throughout the Gospels. When these two types of teachings
are conflated, misinterpretation is the inevitable result. In most cases, Jesus described the morality
of God. He says that God is not a cosmic judge, dispensing reward and
punishment according to sin. However, in
some cases, Jesus is describing human virtue – not to avoid punishment, but to
find the path to resilient human happiness.
In every wisdom tradition, virtue and the path to resilient happiness requires
self-denial, self-discipline, the pursuit of wisdom, compassion, and focus on
the divine and the eternal. In this
passage, Jesus is exhorting us to the virtue of self-denial.
For whoever
wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake
will find it.
This appears to be a commentary on the
counter-intuitive nature of virtue: we might expect that self-denial is the
path to misery and dissatisfaction, but Jesus (along with every other guru) promises that it leads in the opposite way - to the most resilient, abiding happiness. I wouldn’t know because I lack any modicum of the
virtue of self-denial.
What profit
would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what
can one give in exchange for his life?
This is further commentary on virtue: If
giving everything away would make you ten percent happier, would you do it? The answer is embedded in the question. Everyone’s goal is sustained, resilient happiness
and if one could be assured that giving away every worldly possession would increase
one’s happiness the only rational decision is clear. Correspondingly, if a lifetime of acquisitiveness
doesn’t lead to happiness, why would you do it?
For the Son of
Man will come with his angels in his Father's glory, and then he will repay all
according to his conduct.
This looks suspiciously like a
subsequent edit. It runs directly
counter to the Beatitudes and almost every other saying of Jesus. Like the last line of Ecclesiastes, it is
discordant and likely the addition of a moralistic redactor.
Truly, I say to
you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the
Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
This last line was omitted from this
Sunday’s Gospel reading, but I have re-added it because it has such an
interesting history. This line inspired
early Christians to believe the Second Coming would happen within a generation. It also may have inspired the legend referred
to in the enigmatic third-to-last verse of the Gospel of John (21:23) which indicated
early Christians believed the apostle John would live an unnaturally long time
until Jesus returned.
Unnatural longevity until the Second
Coming was sometimes considered a blessing.
In Luke 2:25, the infant Jesus is presented to Simeon, who was blessed
by God to live until he laid eyes on the Christ. His exclamation is a closing passage of Night Prayer in the daily Liturgy of the Hours: “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace. Your word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation which you
have prepared in the sight of every people…”
But unnatural longevity was also sometimes considered a curse. A thirteenth century legend told of a man named Cartaphilus
– sometimes depicted as Pontius Pilate’s gatekeeper who struck Jesus as he
entered the palace – who is cursed to wander the Earth until the Second Coming.
This character, played as an ageless, murderous Catholic priest, was prominent in the 1988 apocalyptic movie, The Seventh Sign.
* Of course, Christianity is principally concerned not with what Jesus taught or did but what he, as the Incarnation of the divine, represents or embodies.
