From the cradle to the cross - the cost of the call (4)

Another of my Advent readings this week was Matthew 16: 21 - 28, a passage that we perhaps more often associate with Easter than with Christmas. You don’t get much clearer than this. Jesus spoke to His disciples first of all about the price that He Himself would have to pay, and then expanded that to explain the cost of being one of His followers.

We know that it was a cost for Jesus, and not just something easy, because of His strong reaction when Peter tried to talk Him out of it: "Me pones en peligro de care ” he says in my Spanish translation - "You put me in danger of falling."  In English, He calls Peter a “stumbling block.”  The fact that Jesus saw the possibility of falling and failing is evidence that His calling represented a high cost and therefore a real temptation to avoid the suffering and pain. But He understood clearly (vs 23b) that avoiding the sacrifice would be man’s way, and embracing the cost would require seeing things from God’s perspective.

At this point, Jesus has only told His disciples that He is going to be killed. He hasn’t specifically mentioned that it will be by the cruel death of crucifixion. But crucifixion was a common enough concept in those days for the disciples to reel at the startling imagery of what Jesus said next: "Whoever wants to follow Me must deny themselves and pick up their cross." The disciples probably gave a gasp of shock and horror. Even if they didn’t yet suspect that this is how Jesus would die, they knew that a person carrying a cross had no life of their own any more, and was going to lose everything.

Who would do that? Who would  deliberately volunteer for suffering and trauma? And yet, throughout history, there have been times when men have done something similar: they have volunteered to go to war, knowing that their time would no longer be their own and that they would be giving up their personal freedom.  They volunteered with a higher purpose in sight, knowing that they might not come back alive.

But at least victory is a possibility in times of war: there’s always a possibility that the soldier will survive the battle. Not so with the person carrying a cross; when people saw that, they knew that the individual was headed to certain death. It must have sounded shocking and incomprehensible to these early disciples.

So Jesus needed to explain further, and help them see things in the light of eternity: what good would it do a person to save their own life and gain the whole world in the present time, if it means that he or she loses their soul, the eternal part of them? Very slowly, these first disciples began to realise that there would be a cost to their calling, perhaps a higher cost than they had already paid when deciding to leave behind their homes, families and livelihoods to follow Jesus. From that point onwards, they probably began to grapple with the idea, and perhaps to talk among themselves, about what it might really mean to “lose their lives for Jesus’ sake.”

When we hear the Christmas message, our hearts are filled with joy and thankfulness - and rightly so. But we sometimes miss sight of the great cost paid by Mary and Joseph, the later cost paid by Jesus and His early disciples, and the cost there could be to ourselves if we choose to respond to His call.

Yes, there’s a cost, but the wonder of the Christmas story reminds us that there is also the miraculous blessing of Emmanuel, God with us. No wonder a later disciple, a missionary called Paul, said that he was willing to pay absolutely any price (Philippians 3: 7 - 10) because nothing in this world can compare to the “surpassing greatness” of knowing Jesus in that very present, intimate way. The call has a cost, but the cost could never possibly compare with the amazing privilege of that call.