“The King on a Cross.”
From the Scripture passage found in Mark 8:27-9:1, this past Sunday we learned that Jesus is not just the Christ, not just the Messiah, not just the anointed King… he’s the King that “must suffer.” He’s the King on a cross. Never before Jesus, has anyone brought the prophecies about the Messianic King together with those about the Suffering Servant. This wasn’t just unexpected… it was outrageous! Thus, in verse 32, Peter takes Jesus aside and “began to rebuke him.” Peter condemns Jesus in the strongest possible language, and the text uses a word that describes what Jesus usually does to demons — He rebukes them. Jesus says the only way to defeat evil and put everything right in the world is for Him to suffer.
Then starting in verse 34, Jesus says that every Christian, every believer, every follower of Christ must deny themselves and lose their life. Here Jesus doesn’t mean we must seek physical death. The word life in this text means “identity.” He is saying we must stop basing our identity (who we are) on what we do. How would you answer the question, “Who are you?” Can you answer it without falling back on what you’ve done or what you have? What lets you know you value? What lets you feel like you mean something?
On the last page of his classic book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis comments on losing yourself to find yourself:
“The more we get what we now call ourselves out of the way and let him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. Our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surrounding and drives. Without Him, what I so proudly call myself becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events I never started and cannot stop. Most of what I call me, can be easily explained by my physical drive or by what others have said or done to me. It is only when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His personality that I finally begin to have a real personality all of my own. Nevertheless, you must not go to Christ for the sake of a new self. As long as it is your own self that you are concentrating on then you haven’t really begun to go to Him.”
Jesus says I went to the cross to lose my identity so you could have one. On the cross He lost His relationship with His Father, which was the source of His identity, so that we could become adopted children of God. Praise Jesus!