Living In Denial

Matthew 16: 21-27

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.

The following is an email I received from a good friend and I am quoting her with permission. She was just emerging, full of grace, from an extremely difficult time in her life. She discovered the true meaning of taking up her cross and practicing self-denial:

I’ve been thinking a lot about what we discussed during our visit and I am feeling freer and freer all the time.  I think that is essential to living in the moment. When you are at the beginning of the journey, trying to balance and understand the church's role in our salvation, 'how to be good' and then wrestling with all that as you develop your own conscience and beliefs - living in the moment is so hard!  It's got so much more fear and uncertainty at those stages.  You want to ‘cover your butt’ - make sure you are ‘building up enough 'points’, even if not with full awareness.  But once you trust that you are truly loved, once you can abandon your future and your salvation to that God who loves you, THEN you can be in the moment.  I am feeling freer not to focus on keeping the law.  Not to say that his directives aren't important, but they flow naturally out of loving relationship.  If you keep trying to follow the directives without the loving relationship, it sort of becomes bean counting, and a 'you owe me based on my faithful obedience' exchange.  I want more freedom that that.  I want to live NOW, not wait for heaven.  I want joy!  I want self-sacrifice too, but to have it flow out of joy, not fear, not a bartering tactic.

These words are a perfect illustration of how we should listen to this week’s gospel. It would be easy to interpret Jesus’ words as a hard and inflexible perspective about the rigors of following him.  In the first stage of the spiritual life, when we hear the words “deny yourself”, we endeavor to accept all our sufferings willingly and perhaps try to add to the pile, not just because Jesus suffered and carried his own cross willingly but also because we fear that if we don’t pick up our crosses, there’ll be payback time later on. There’s a subtle hope that if we carry all the crosses that come our way, the payback will be a pat on the back and free entrance into heaven. That’s how the first stage goes. It’s a stage of learning the rules and growing up straight and strong. It’s in this stage that we learn the parameters of the law and develop our inner moral compass. We focus on what’s expected of us. We could say that the first stage is about learning self-control.

The next stage is discovering how to be out of control.

Last week Jesus told Peter his name was, “Rock On Which I Will Build My Church”. This week, Jesus speaks about his coming Passion and Peter gets right back into gear. Jesus’ statements would have been shocking anyway but Jesus talking about going to his death did not fit in at all with the visions and expectations that were swirling around in Peter’s head. “Jesus can’t talk about dying! We're going to build a church together!” Peter immediately rebuked Jesus because what Jesus said didn’t fit in with Peter’s idea of how things should be. It didn’t fit in with his desire to keep Jesus in his pocket as a talisman to keep around someone who would bring good luck and keep everything on track and everyone happy. To Peter, Jesus was still the ‘Magic Messiah’: if you rubbed him just the right way, amazing things might take place. Peter was willing to let Jesus be in control as long as what Jesus did fit into Peter’s idea of what Jesus should do. As soon as Jesus indicated that life might not fit into Peter’s perceptions of what was right and good, Peter’s false self kicked in and tried to gain control. ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ The ultimate denial of self is to say to the false self, “You have no idea of what should be happening and you have no capacity to understand what is truly needed in any situation.” What false self wants to do is to get control, make judgments, put everything into categories, decide what is right and what is wrong and then strive like crazy to make everything happen according to those judgments and categories. The second stage of the spiritual life is where we discover that the perceptions of the false self can be very faulty and that we have absolutely no capacity to really know how our judgments and actions will affect the lives of those around us or affect us personally. The false self would view “letting go” as being flung precariously into the winds of circumstance but when we finally trust in God’s immense love and say, “Your will, not mine,” we start to discover immense freedom. As my friend put it, “…once you trust that you are truly loved, once you can abandon your future and your salvation to that God that loves you, THEN you can be in the moment.” It is false self that takes us out of the present moment where God dwells, shoves us into the chaos of our own limited visions and fears and makes us fight hard to make sure our spiritual life is under control. We pray but we pray with certain outcomes firmly in mind and do everything we can, to make sure those outcomes are realized.

When Jesus invites us to deny ourselves and take up our cross, he is inviting us to be out of control. It is indeed a cross for all of us to step down off the platform of false self. The circumstances that lead us to allow God to be in full control are often situations of great inner crucifixion and pain. These crosses present us with cross roads or crisis points where we can either decide to continue to fight and struggle to keep everything in line with our set in stone perceptions of what’s spiritually right and necessary or we can decide to step down, let go of the awful responsibility of being 'right' and walk into the resurrection power of a life that flows out of the freedom and joy of being loved by the God of the present moment.

‘For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?’ When our false selves are in control of our spiritual life and are struggling mightily to stay in control, we are forfeiting real life. We can make everything happen that we think should happen, we can line everything and everyone up according to the pictures in our heads and we can be totally right - but the real life of knowing our true names and knowing how beloved and cared for we are is forfeit.

In this week’s gospel, Jesus is inviting Peter - and us - to discover greater freedom and peace by taking our minds off of human perspectives and moving our hearts into divine truth. Remember, in John 6:63, Jesus said, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh (false self) is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

The false self is utterly useless. Can you deny it?