What feels like a hundred years ago, now, when I was a young adult, I had a membership to a boxing gym that I would go to after work. The gym had a class at that time, and it was a group of people a lot like me, men and women my age who wanted to get some exercise and stress relief after a day of work. One of the things the trainer would do with us was some pad work. He would go around to each of us, and would work with us at our own level, calling out punches and we would have to throw those punches at the pads on his hands. There was a pattern to it, once you learned it, and then the challenge was to keep up with him. But sometimes, we would get ahead of him, and mess things up. Then he’d give us a tap on the arm with the pad, and would say, “You’re way ahead of me!”
I thought about that with regard to today’s Gospel reading. After professing the fact that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, Saint Peter in classic Saint Peter fashion takes Jesus to task for teaching them that he, the Son of Man, “must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.” Peter was distressed at hearing that Jesus, the one who he just a few verses ago, said was the Christ, would talk about suffering, because they never expected the Messiah to have to undergo any such thing. Jesus turns around and says to Peter, “Get behind me…” Just like my boxing trainer, he is trying to teach them something, but Peter is way ahead of him.
And that’s no place for a disciple to be. Because disciples don’t get ahead of their master, they follow him. When you’re ahead of the teacher, you can’t learn anything. When you’re following him, you can see what he does, hear what he’s saying, and learn things that lead to life. This is a very important observation, that I have to tell you, came from praying through the Gospel reading at this week’s staff meeting.
Here’s why this is so important: because Jesus wants the disciples to follow, wants us to follow. He says quite plainly:
“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
and that of the gospel will save it.”
He’s making it very clear here that winning the kingdom, saving our lives for eternity, means suffering in this life. He was going to model that for them on the way to the Cross, and into the glory of the Resurrection. But if we are way ahead of him, we are absolutely going to be on the wrong road.
So we are called, by the very words of our Savior, to take up our cross and follow him. That wasn’t just for Saint Peter and the other Apostles; it is for all Jesus’ disciples, including ourselves. There is no other way to the salvation for which we yearn. Following Jesus will ultimately lead us to glory if we do it faithfully. But following him will also lead us to the Cross. Yesterday we celebrated that mystery in the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. Yes, we will suffer in this life, in all sorts of ways, yes we will die, but that death will release us to the glory of the resurrection, if we embrace it in faith.
In our world, suffering is looked upon as something to be avoided at all costs. Commercials on television and social media promise all sorts of relief if we will take this or that pill. Worse than that, people are legislating circumstances for when it’s appropriate to kill ourselves through euthanasia so that we won’t have to suffer, and pro-abortion people want to say it’s okay to abort a baby who has the wrong chromosomes or might suffer in any way. We avoid suffering in every way we possibly can, so it might be hard to get behind this Jesus who says that the way to heaven is to take up the cross, to suffer, to die, and to follow his lead.
The psalmist sums it up for us today. Yes, the suffering in our lives leads us to experience the cords of death that encompass us. We often fall into distress and sorrow. But when we embrace that suffering and call on the Lord, we will find ourselves freed of death and able to walk before the Lord in the land of the living. We who have embraced and remembered and celebrated the mystery of Christ’s presence in our lives, in our Church and in our world, can approach suffering with great faith. Some years ago now, there was a contemporary Christian song that said “sometimes he calms the storm, and other times he calms his child.” God won’t always make our tears and pain go away. But he does promise that we will never go through them alone.
The real truth of life in this world is that there is suffering, and none of us gets a free pass. Even Mary, full of grace, had to watch her Son suffer and die. Even Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and he himself suffered a terrible, painful, humiliating death. None of us gets out of this life unscathed. In some crazy sense, we all are united in the fact that we all suffer, some time and for something. And so it is in fact audacious and even offensive that Saint Peter rebukes our Lord for talking about suffering. Peter himself will suffer a similar fate as that of his Lord, being crucified upside-down. Every one of us, in some way, has to take up the cross and walk with it, because it is only in doing that that we can make our way to the Resurrection.
And we have to acknowledge, friends, is that we have it a lot easier than our Lord did. We just bear our own suffering; he had to take with him the suffering of every person embroiled in sin in all of time. We have him to help us take up our crosses and to help make those crosses lighter; he had no one except for Simon of Cyrene who helped him begrudgingly. His death had to blast open the gates of heaven; we will just get to walk through it, if we follow him and live the gospel.
And so, we weak ones who don’t love suffering, we must hear the words that Jesus spoke to Simon Peter spoken also to us. Don’t get ahead of me; take up your cross and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it.