'And it came to pass, as He was alone praying, His
disciples were with Him; and He asked them, saying,
Whom say the people that I am I 19. They answering,
said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and
others say, that one of the old prophets is risen
again. 20. He said unto them, But whom say ye that I
am? Peter answering, said, The Christ of God. 21. And
He straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell
no man that thing; 22. Saying, The Son of man must
suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders,
and chief priests, and scribes, and be slain, and be
raised the third day. 23. And He said to them all, If
any man will come after Me. let him deny himself, and
take up his cross daily, and follow Me. 24. For
whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but
whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the same
shall save it. 25. For what is a man advantaged, if he
gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast
away? 26. For whosoever shall be ashamed of Me, and of
My words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when
He shall come in His own glory, and in His Father's,
and of the holy angels. 27. But I tell you of a truth,
there be some standing here, which shall not taste of
death, till they see the kingdom of God.'--Luke ix. 18-27.
This passage falls into three distinct but closely connected parts:
the disciples' confession of Christ by Peters mouth, the revelation
to them of Christ's sufferings as necessarily involved in His
Messiahship, and His extension to them of the law of suffering as
necessarily involved in discipleship. Luke dwells much more lightly
than Matthew on the first of these stages, omitting the eulogium and
benediction on Simon Bar-Jona, and the great words about the rock on
which the Church is built, but he retains the essentials, and
emphasises the connection of the three parts by his very brevity in
regard to the first.
I. Luke has special interest in recording Christ's prayers, and
though he does not tell us where the great confession was made, he
tells what Jesus did before it was made. We may well suppose that
His solitary thoughts had been busied with the sufferings on which
He was soon to enter, and that His resolve to impart the knowledge
of these to His followers was felt by Him to be a sharp trial of
their loyalty. The moment was a fateful one. How should fateful
moments be prepared for but by communion with the Father? No doubt
the feebleness of the disciples was remembered in His petitions.
Jesus' double question was intended, first, to make the disciples
feel the gulf which separated them from the rest of the nation, and
so to make them hold the faster by their unshared faith, and be
ready to suffer for it, if needful, as probably it would be. It
braces true men to know that they are but a little company in the
midst of multitudes who laugh at their belief. That Jesus should
have seen that it was safe to accentuate the disciples' isolation
indicates the reality which He discerned in their faith, imperfect
as it was.
'Whom say ye that I am?' Jesus brings them to articulate utterance
of the thought that had been slowly gathering distinctness in their
minds. We see our beliefs more clearly, and hold them more firmly,
when we put them into definite words. The question acted like a
chemical element dropped into a solution, which precipitates its
solid matter. Nebulous opinions are gathered up into spheres of
light by the process of speaking them. That question is all-important
for us. Our conceptions of Christ's nature and office determine our
relation to Him and our whole cast of life. True, we may say that He
is Lord, and not be His disciples, but we are not His disciples as He
would have us unless His Messiahship stands out clear and axiomatic
in our thoughts of Him. The conviction must pass into feeling, and
thence into life, but it must underlie all real discipleship.
Doctrine is not Christianity, but it is the foundation of
Christianity. The Apostolic confession here is the 'irreducible
minimum' of the Christian creed.
It does not contain more than Nathanael had said at the beginning,
but here it is spoken, not as Peter's private belief, but he is the
mouthpiece of all. 'Whether it were I or they, so we' believe. This
confession summed up the previous development of the disciples, and
so marked the end of one stage and the beginning of another. Christ
would have them, as it were, take stock of their convictions, as
preliminary to opening a new chapter of teaching.
II. That new chapter follows at once. The belief in Him as Messiah
is the first story of the building, and the second is next piled on
it. The new lesson was a hard one for men whose hopes were coloured
by Jewish dreams of a kingdom. They had to see all these vulgar
visions melting away, and to face a stern, sad reality. The very
fact that He was the Messiah necessarily drew after it the fact of
suffering. Whence did the 'must' arise? From the divine purpose,
from the necessities of the case, and the aim of His mission. These
had shaped prophetic utterances, and hence there was yet another
form of the 'must,' namely, the necessity for the Messiah's
fulfilling these predictions.
No doubt our Lord led His saddened listeners to many a prophetic
saying which current expositions had smoothed over, but which had
for many years set before Him His destiny. What a scene that would
be--the victim calmly pointing to the tragic words which flashed
ominous new meanings to the silent hearers, stricken with awe and
grief as the terrible truth entered their minds! What had become of
their dreams? Gone, and in their place shame and death. They had
fancied a throne; the vision melted into a cross.
We note the minute particularity of Jesus' delineation, and the
absolute certainty in His plain declaration of the fact and time of
the Resurrection. It is not wonderful that that declaration should
have produced little effect. The disciples were too much absorbed
and confounded by the dismal thought of His death to have ears for
the assurance of His Resurrection. Comfort coming at the end of the
announcement of calamities so great finds no entrance into, nor room
in, the heart. We all let a black foreground hide from us a brighter
distance.
III. The Master's feet mark the disciples' path. If suffering was
involved in Messiahship, it is no less involved in discipleship. The
cross which is our hope is also our pattern. In a very real sense we
have to be partakers of the sufferings of Christ, and no faith in
these as substitutionary is vital unless it leads to being conformed
to His death. The solemn verses at the close of this lesson draw out
the law of Christian self-denial as being inseparable from true
discipleship.
Verse 23 lays down the condition of following Jesus as being the
daily bearing, by each, of his own cross. Mark that self-denial is
not prescribed for its own sake, but simply as the means of
'following.' False asceticism insists on it, as if it were an end;
Christ treats it as a means. Mark, too, that it is 'self' which is
to be denied--not this or that part of our nature, but the central
'self.' The will is the man, and _it_ is to be brought into
captivity to Jesus, so that the true Christian says, 'I live; yet
not I, but Christ liveth in me.' That is much deeper, harder,
wholesomer teaching than separate austerities or forsakings of this
or that.
Verse 24 grounds this great requirement on the broad principle that
to make self the main object of life is the sure way to ruin
oneself, and that to slay self is the road to true life. Note that
it is he who '_would_ save' his life that loses it, because the
desire is itself fatal, whether carried out or not; while it is he
who _does_ 'lose' his life for Christ that preserves it,
because even if the extreme evil has been suffered, the possession
of our true lives is not imperilled thereby. No doubt the words
refer primarily to literal death, and threaten the cowards who
sacrifice their convictions for the sake of keeping a whole skin
with the failure of their efforts, while they promise the martyr
dying in the arena or at the stake a crown of life. But they go far
beyond that. They carry the great truth that to hug self and to make
its preservation our first aim is ruinous, and the corresponding
one, that to slay self for Christ's sake is to receive a better
self. Self-preservation is suicide; self-immolation is not only
self-preservation, but self-glorification with glory caught from
Jesus. Give yourselves to Him, and He gives you back to yourselves,
ennobled and transfigured.
Verse 25 urges obedience to the precept, by an appeal to reasonable
self-regard and common-sense. The abnegation enjoined does not
require that we should be indifferent to our own well-being. It is
right to consider what will 'profit,' and to act accordingly. The
commercial view of life, if rightly taken, with regard to all a
man's nature through all the duration of it, will coincide
accurately with the most exalted. It 'pays' to follow Christ.
Christian morality has not the hypersensitive fear of appealing to
self-interest which superfine moralists profess nowadays. And the
question in verse 25 admits of only one answer, for what good is the
whole world to a dead man? If our accounts are rightly kept, a world
gained shows poorly on the one side, against the entry on the other
of a soul lost.
Verse 26 tells in what that losing oneself consists, and enforces
the original exhortation by the declaration of a future appearance
of the Son of man. He of whom Christ is then ashamed loses his own
soul. To live without His smile is to die, to be disowned by Him is
to be a wreck. To be ashamed of Jesus is equivalent to that base
self-preservation which has been denounced as fatal. If a man
disavows all connection with Him, He will disavow all connection
with the disavower. A man separated from Jesus is dead while he
lives, and hereafter will live a living death, and possess neither
the world for which he sacrificed his own soul nor the soul for
which he sacrificed it.
We cannot but note the authoritative tone of our Lord in these
verses. He claims the obedience and discipleship of all men. He
demands that all shall yield themselves unreservedly to Him, and
that, even if actual surrender of life is involved, it shall be
gladly given. He puts our relation to Him as determining our whole
present and future. He assumes to be our Judge, whose smile is life,
whose averted face darkens the destiny of a man. Whom say ye that He
who dared to speak thus conceived Himself to be? Whom say ye that He
is?
Verse 27 recalls us from the contemplation of that far-off
appearance to something nearer. Remembering the previous
announcement of our Lord's sufferings, these words seem intended to
cheer the disciples with the hope that the kingdom would still be
revealed within the lifetime of some then present. Remembering the
immediately preceding words, this saying seems to assure the
disciples that the blessed recompense of the life of self-crucifying
discipleship is not to be postponed to that future, but may be
enjoyed on earth. Remembering Christ's word, 'Except a man be born
again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,' we doubt whether there is
any reference here to the destruction of Jerusalem, as is commonly
understood. Are not the words rather a declaration that they who are
Christ's true disciples shall even here enter into the possession of
their true selves, and find the Messianic hopes more than fulfilled?
The future indicated will then be no more remote than the completion
of His work by His death and Resurrection, or, at the farthest, the
descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, by which the fuller life of
renewed natures was bestowed on those who were following Jesus in
daily self-surrender.