Gospel Notes by Michael Whelan SM
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, and 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” (Matthew 16:21–27 – NRSV).
Introduction
General
This text must be read together with the text immediately preceding it – the text we read last Sunday. In that text – Matthew 16:13-20 – we hear Peter affirm Jesus as the Messiah. We then hear Jesus affirm Peter as “the rock” on which the Church (ekklesia) is to be built, and that he – Peter – speaks with words that come from the “Father in heaven”. In the text today – Matthew 16:21-23 – we hear Peter remonstrate with Jesus, protesting that he must not go to Jerusalem and suffer and die. We then hear Jesus rebuke Peter as “a stumbling block” (skandalum, literally, “scandal”) – rather than a “rock” – and that he – Peter – is one through whom “Satan” is speaking – rather than the “Father in heaven”.
The point/counter-point of this whole unit suggests that the early communities had begun to come to terms with the divine-human nature of the ekklesia. The leader can, on the one hand, speak the most resounding and profound affirmation of faith, placing him firmly on the side of the Kingdom of heaven. He can also be an obstacle and speak and act in ways that mean he is an instrument of one of “the kingdoms of the world” (4:8).
Specific
From that time on: Matthew indicates a special moment in the ministry of Jesus. “(This phrase) marks the incident as of critical importance; it changed the whole thrust of Jesus’ instruction of the Twelve. Now that it was clear that the little band had come to understand that Jesus was indeed the long-promised Messiah, he proceeded to teach them something of what messiahship meant. For the Jews in general, and presumably for the Twelve up to this point, being Messiah meant unadulterated glory. The Messiah might encounter opposition and even hardship, but this kind of thing was no more than an unpleasantness that must be endured on the way to majesty and splendor. For Jesus, suffering was the essence of messiahship, and from this point on he brings it out again and again (cf. 17:9, 12, 22–23; 20:18–19, 28; 21:38–39; 26:2). Learning this was a lesson the disciples found very hard indeed” (Leon Morris, The Gospel according to Matthew, Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans; 1992, 427-428).
Jerusalem: “Jerusalem is ‘the city of destiny for Jesus and the pivot for the salvation of mankind’ (Joseph Fitzmyer, Luke 1–9 AB, 164). Jesus has a special relationship to Jerusalem, which is the goal toward which he moves throughout the gospel. …. Matthew’s gospel, beginning with the infancy narrative, contains several references to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is called the ‘holy city’ (4:5; 27:53); Jerusalem is also described as the ‘city of the great King’ (5:35), given as the reason for not swearing by Jerusalem. Matthew (27:51 = Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45) refers to the curtain of the Jerusalem Temple being torn at the crucifixion, an indication of the new source of salvation in Jesus” (P J King, “Jerusalem (Place)”, in D. N. Freedman (Ed.), The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Vol. 3), New York, NY: Doubleday, 1992, 765).
elders and chief priests and scribes: These men “constituted the highest Jewish council in Jerusalem, known as the Sanhedrin. They had supreme authority in matters of the Jewish faith, and the Roman government even allowed them to exercise some power in the regulation of Jewish life” (B M Newman, & P C Stine, A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew, New York, NY: United Bible Societies, 1992, 527).
on the third day be raised: We can understand that this revelation of the resurrection would not have hit home. The horrible revelation that Jesus is to go to Jerusalem and die precisely as the Messiah would have made it well-nigh impossible for them to hear anything else in that moment.
let them deny themselves: In the context of Jesus’ prophetic words concerning his own journey to Jerusalem and what is to happen there, these words are powerful and central to discipleship. “Jesus is not saying that anyone who concentrates on his own selfish concerns will be punished by having his life taken from him. He is saying that, by the very fact that he concentrates on his own selfish concerns, that person has lost life in the best and fullest sense. He exists, but does not live. Jesus is speaking of the person who puts his emphasis on all that increases the sum of things he finds attractive. It is the selfishness that makes one’s personal happiness the ultimate criterion. That, Jesus says, is self-defeating; to concentrate on saving the life is to lose it. It is otherwise with anyone who loses his life for my sake. Again, there is the whoever that makes the words universal. But this time it is not only the will to lose one’s life that Jesus is speaking of, but actually losing it. This is the complete opposite of willing to save one’s life. Jesus is not talking about some masochistic activity; he is not referring to someone who has such a poor self-esteem that his life crumbles. He is referring to the person who loses his life for my sake, the one who puts the service of God’s Messiah before all else, who counts all well lost for Christ’s sake and who consequently devotes all his time to serving Christ and other people for Christ’s sake. That person will find life. He now finds that the life he lived before giving up all for Christ was not really life at all. Full and abundant life is the life of service, the life in Christ, the life that takes anyone out of concentration on merely selfish concerns and puts ultimate meaning into life.” (Leon Morris, op cit, 432).
the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father: Jesus sets the whole drama in an apocalyptic context where everyone and everything will be shown in its true light.
Reflection
One of Merton’s most celebrated passages is found in the original 1949 version of Seeds of Contemplation and kept in the 1962 version of that book. It speaks to the heart of the inner struggle for authenticity in the face of the ever present seduction of the illusory. Merton here focuses mostly on the “false self” – concretely, not a bad place to start:
“Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
“This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
“My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
“We are not very good at recognizing illusions: least of all the ones we have about ourselves – the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which does not and cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.
“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life trying to accumulate pleasures and experiences and power and honor and knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself up with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.
“But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.”[1]
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1962, 34-35.
Self-denial?
In today’s Gospel – Matthew 16:21-27 – Jesus announces a puzzling if not shocking teaching. “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.” This is the second time in Matthew’s Gospel that we hear Jesus say this – see 10:38-39. Yet we have also heard Jesus say twice that we must “love our neighbour as we love ourselves” – see 19:19 and 22:39. How does “denial of self” fit with “love of self”? Actually, the “love of self” needs the “denial of self.” This will become clear if we break free of the individualism that dominates our culture and open ourselves to the biblical vision of “self.”
The biblical vision is grounded in the truth that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Each of is a unique revelation of that Community of Love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is unique purpose and meaning built into our very existence. We are free to choose, either to nurture our unique identity or to seek an alternative identity. It is a choice between the “true self” and the “false self.” The first – the “true self” – must be enabled to become the one God intended. The second – the “false self” – must be denied its pseudo-identity. Moment by moment, the choice is ours.
The “true self” does not thrive nor does the “false self” die, unless we cooperate with God’s creating presence. It is essential that we promote a constant awareness of God’s presence. The promise, “I am with you!” – see Exodus 3:1-15 – is fulfilled in Jesus. He is the Messiah. Through him, with him and in him we discover who we are – the “true self.”
The task to seek the “true self” rather than the “false self,” takes on a peculiar challenge in our time. Our culture, in so many ways, draws us towards the pursuit of the “false self.” Pope Leo, addressing the issue of AI, offers some wise words:
“Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. …. While it is right to strive to alleviate the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude, knowing that ‘religious experience, and in particular Christian faith, propose that we live, without oversimplification, this ambivalence between human greatness and limitation, interpreting it in the light of our original and fundamental relationship with God’” (International Theological Commission, Quo vadis, humanitas? (9 February 2026), 3) (Magnifica Humanitas, 131).