On Jesus’ Passion and Discipleship
Mt 16:21-27
21Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised. 22Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” 23He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
24Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. 25For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26What 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? 27For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay everyone according to his conduct.”
THE FOLLY AND THE GLORY OF THE CROSS. Simon Peter is shocked to hear Jesus predicting that he will suffer and die in Jerusalem. And rightly so! Peter has just confessed Jesus as the Messiah of God, and Jesus has called him “Rock” because of that confession. How, then, can Jesus speak of the cross when a crucified man is cursed by God? The Messiah is meant to be a glorious figure, not a man of suffering!
The message is just as shocking when preached to the Gentile world. A crucified Messiah as God’s means of reconciling a lost world is a bizarre message, not “good news.”
In the early third century, the pagan Caecilius Natalis said of Christians, “I hear that they adore the head of an ass, the basest of creatures—a most worthy and appropriate religion for such manners.” A graffito of a man’s body with the head of an ass found in Palestine reflects a similar response by Gentiles to the “folly of the cross.” Under this graffito was the caption: “Alexamenos worships [his] God.”
The cross can be “good news” only if its meaning is completely overturned. This was shown in the resurrection of Jesus. God was pleased with Jesus’ obedience “to death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8) that God raised him from the dead.
Paul, the first theologian, is a theologian of the cross. According to him, the cross is the initiative of God and the demonstration of his great love: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). Jesus’ cross is not an accident of history but a historical witness to God’s unmerited love and saving grace: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor 5:19).
Paul comes to this realization not as an afterthought but through a dramatic encounter with the risen Christ. On the way to Damascus, Christ “apprehends” him and shows him that Christ is in fact what the disciples preach him to be. Paul is struck by the “power and glory of the cross” as if by lightning.
This is the conviction that Paul then preaches to both Jews and Gentiles. They understand the paradox of the cross and become believers, ready to lose their lives that they may find it in Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment