Deny Yourself
Deny Yourself
Matthew 16: 21 - 28
21 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.
22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
The Cross and Self-Denial
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
26 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?
27 “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.
28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
I want to begin this morning not with today’s reading, but with last week’s, because Matthew does not let us understand the one without the other.
Matthew 16: 21 - 28
21 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.
22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
The Cross and Self-Denial
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
26 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?
27 “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.
28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
I want to begin this morning not with today’s reading, but with last week’s, because Matthew does not let us understand the one without the other.
Just before our passage opens, Jesus and the disciples are walking north, up beyond the Sea of Galilee, into Gentile territory, to the district of Caesarea Philippi — a place thick with shrines to Pan and to Caesar, a place where the power of Rome was carved into the very rock.
And there, of all places, Jesus turns to his disciples and asks the question that every generation of the church has had to answer for itself: “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter — impulsive, big-hearted, not always right but always ready to speak — gets it right.
“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus blesses him for it.
“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”
It is one of the great mountaintop moments of the Gospel. Peter has said the true thing. He has seen what only the Father could show him.
And then — verse twenty-one, where our reading picks up today — everything changes.
“From that time on,” Matthew tells us, “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.”
From that time on.
And there, of all places, Jesus turns to his disciples and asks the question that every generation of the church has had to answer for itself: “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter — impulsive, big-hearted, not always right but always ready to speak — gets it right.
“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus blesses him for it.
“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”
It is one of the great mountaintop moments of the Gospel. Peter has said the true thing. He has seen what only the Father could show him.
And then — verse twenty-one, where our reading picks up today — everything changes.
“From that time on,” Matthew tells us, “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.”
From that time on.
The hinge of the Gospel turns right here.
Everything before this has been Galilee — teaching, healing, feeding, calming storms, gathering a following.
Everything after this is the long road to Jerusalem, to a cross, to a grave, to an empty tomb.
Peter has just said the truest thing anyone has said in the whole Gospel so far.
Everything before this has been Galilee — teaching, healing, feeding, calming storms, gathering a following.
Everything after this is the long road to Jerusalem, to a cross, to a grave, to an empty tomb.
Peter has just said the truest thing anyone has said in the whole Gospel so far.
And now Jesus has to tell him what that truth is actually going to cost.
The Weight of “Must”
Notice the word Matthew uses: Jesus “must” go to Jerusalem.
Not “will,” not “is going to risk,” but must.
There is a kind of grim, settled necessity in that word.
This is not an accident that befalls Jesus.
It is not a plot that catches him unprepared.
It is the shape that faithfulness is going to take, in a world that organizes itself around power, and Jesus is not going to swerve from it.
We should sit with that for a moment, because it is easy for us, on this side of Easter, with our crosses on steeples and around our necks, to lose the strangeness of it.
Suffering and death were not, for Peter, part of what “Messiah” meant.
The Messiah was supposed to be the one who broke the yoke of Rome, who set David’s throne upright again, who made Israel’s enemies bow down.
Nowhere in Peter’s imagination — nowhere in almost anyone’s imagination in first-century Judea — was there room for a Messiah who marched toward Jerusalem to be killed.
So when Jesus says this plainly — not in parable, not in riddle, but plainly — Peter does what any of us would do for someone we love.
He pulls Jesus aside.
He begins to rebuke him.
“God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
I want to be gentle with Peter here, because I think most days I would have said the same thing.
This is not the voice of a coward or a fool.
This is the voice of a friend who cannot bear to hear that the person he loves is walking toward death, and who still believes, in that moment, that love means talking him out of it.
“God forbid it, Lord.”
Some translations render it “Never, Lord!” or “This shall never happen to you!”
It is the most natural sentence in the world.
The Weight of “Must”
Notice the word Matthew uses: Jesus “must” go to Jerusalem.
Not “will,” not “is going to risk,” but must.
There is a kind of grim, settled necessity in that word.
This is not an accident that befalls Jesus.
It is not a plot that catches him unprepared.
It is the shape that faithfulness is going to take, in a world that organizes itself around power, and Jesus is not going to swerve from it.
We should sit with that for a moment, because it is easy for us, on this side of Easter, with our crosses on steeples and around our necks, to lose the strangeness of it.
Suffering and death were not, for Peter, part of what “Messiah” meant.
The Messiah was supposed to be the one who broke the yoke of Rome, who set David’s throne upright again, who made Israel’s enemies bow down.
Nowhere in Peter’s imagination — nowhere in almost anyone’s imagination in first-century Judea — was there room for a Messiah who marched toward Jerusalem to be killed.
So when Jesus says this plainly — not in parable, not in riddle, but plainly — Peter does what any of us would do for someone we love.
He pulls Jesus aside.
He begins to rebuke him.
“God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
I want to be gentle with Peter here, because I think most days I would have said the same thing.
This is not the voice of a coward or a fool.
This is the voice of a friend who cannot bear to hear that the person he loves is walking toward death, and who still believes, in that moment, that love means talking him out of it.
“God forbid it, Lord.”
Some translations render it “Never, Lord!” or “This shall never happen to you!”
It is the most natural sentence in the world.
It is exactly what we would say.
Get Behind Me
And Jesus turns on him with a severity that still startles us two thousand years later.
“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.”
Satan.
The same word used at the temptation in the wilderness, back in chapter four, when the tempter offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world without the cross, without the cost, without Jerusalem.
That temptation, it turns out, does not happen only once, alone, in the desert.
It happens again, in the mouth of Jesus’ closest friend, offering him love instead of loss, safety instead of suffering.
That is what makes it so dangerous — not that it comes wrapped in malice, but that it comes wrapped in devotion.
The most persuasive temptations rarely arrive looking like temptations. They arrive looking like the people who love us, telling us that surely, surely, God does not require this of us.
“You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
I don’t think Jesus is saying that human concern, human love, human fear of loss is worthless.
I think he is naming something harder: that there are two different ways of measuring what matters, two different accountings of gain and loss, and they do not agree with each other.
By every human measure, the cross is defeat.
By every human measure, losing your life is the worst thing that can happen to you.
Peter is not wrong about the math.
He is using the wrong ledger.
Get Behind Me
And Jesus turns on him with a severity that still startles us two thousand years later.
“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.”
Satan.
The same word used at the temptation in the wilderness, back in chapter four, when the tempter offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world without the cross, without the cost, without Jerusalem.
That temptation, it turns out, does not happen only once, alone, in the desert.
It happens again, in the mouth of Jesus’ closest friend, offering him love instead of loss, safety instead of suffering.
That is what makes it so dangerous — not that it comes wrapped in malice, but that it comes wrapped in devotion.
The most persuasive temptations rarely arrive looking like temptations. They arrive looking like the people who love us, telling us that surely, surely, God does not require this of us.
“You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
I don’t think Jesus is saying that human concern, human love, human fear of loss is worthless.
I think he is naming something harder: that there are two different ways of measuring what matters, two different accountings of gain and loss, and they do not agree with each other.
By every human measure, the cross is defeat.
By every human measure, losing your life is the worst thing that can happen to you.
Peter is not wrong about the math.
He is using the wrong ledger.
Take Up the Cross
And then Jesus does something remarkable.
He does not simply correct Peter and move on.
He turns to all of the disciples and widens the circle:
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
We have worn this phrase smooth with use.
We speak of “carrying our cross” to mean an ailment, an in-law, a difficult commute, some private burden we endure with a sigh.
But nobody standing on that road to Caesarea Philippi could have heard “take up your cross” as a metaphor for inconvenience.
They had seen crosses.
Crosses stood along the roads leading into Roman cities as a public warning: this is what happens to those who defy the empire.
To take up a cross was not to carry a burden.
It was to walk, condemned, to your own execution, carrying the instrument of it yourself, in full view of everyone who had ever known you.
So when Jesus says this to ordinary fishermen and tax collectors and their friends, he is not offering them a spiritual discipline.
He is asking them whether they are prepared to lose everything the world tells them to protect — reputation, safety, family standing, their very lives — for the sake of a kingdom that does not yet look like anything, that has no armies, no throne, no palace, nothing but a teacher from Nazareth who has just told them he is going to die.
This is the cost of discipleship, and Matthew does not let Jesus soften it.
Deny yourself.
And then Jesus does something remarkable.
He does not simply correct Peter and move on.
He turns to all of the disciples and widens the circle:
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
We have worn this phrase smooth with use.
We speak of “carrying our cross” to mean an ailment, an in-law, a difficult commute, some private burden we endure with a sigh.
But nobody standing on that road to Caesarea Philippi could have heard “take up your cross” as a metaphor for inconvenience.
They had seen crosses.
Crosses stood along the roads leading into Roman cities as a public warning: this is what happens to those who defy the empire.
To take up a cross was not to carry a burden.
It was to walk, condemned, to your own execution, carrying the instrument of it yourself, in full view of everyone who had ever known you.
So when Jesus says this to ordinary fishermen and tax collectors and their friends, he is not offering them a spiritual discipline.
He is asking them whether they are prepared to lose everything the world tells them to protect — reputation, safety, family standing, their very lives — for the sake of a kingdom that does not yet look like anything, that has no armies, no throne, no palace, nothing but a teacher from Nazareth who has just told them he is going to die.
This is the cost of discipleship, and Matthew does not let Jesus soften it.
Deny yourself.
Not deny yourself dessert, or deny yourself a luxury for Lent — deny the self as the center around which your life organizes itself.
Take up your cross — not your inconvenience, but the real possibility of losing everything for Christ’s sake.
And follow me — not follow at a comfortable distance, not follow when it is convenient, but follow toward Jerusalem.
The Strange Arithmetic of the Kingdom
And then comes the sentence that I think is the theological heart of this whole passage, the one that turns everything upside down and then, somehow, right side up:
“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?”
This is not a riddle for its own sake.
It is the deepest truth Jesus knows about the human soul, and it runs exactly counter to every instinct we have.
We are creatures built for self-preservation.
Every fiber of us is wired to protect, secure, insure, and hold on.
And Jesus says: that is precisely the strategy that will cost you your life.
The clenched fist cannot receive a gift.
The life spent guarding itself never actually gets lived.
I think of it sometimes like this: there are two ways to hold a life.
You can hold it like a fist, closed tight around what you have, protecting it from loss.
Or you can hold it like an open hand, offered outward, willing to let it go for something greater than itself.
The tragedy Jesus names is that the fist, for all its effort, cannot actually keep anything.
It can only grip tighter as everything it fears slips away anyway, because nothing in this world was ever ours to keep in the first place.
But the open hand — the life poured out in love, given away for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s — somehow, mysteriously, is the life that is found.
“What will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?”
I have sat with people at the end of long, successful, well-insured lives who could not answer that question.
I suspect most of us know, in our quieter moments, that the things we are most tempted to grasp — status, security, the approval of others, the illusion of control — are not the things that will have mattered when we come to the end of them.
Jesus is not romanticizing poverty or suffering here.
He is naming a spiritual law as real as gravity: a life organized around self-protection slowly suffocates, and a life given away for love finds itself, astonishingly, alive.
Glory on the Other Side
But — and this matters enormously — Jesus does not leave us on the cross.
He does not end this teaching with loss for loss’s own sake, as though suffering were the point.
He ends by lifting our eyes to the horizon:
“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.
Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
This is a hard verse, and honest preaching should say so.
Scholars have wrestled for centuries with what Jesus meant by “some standing here will not taste death” — whether he pointed toward the Transfiguration that Matthew places just six days later, when Peter, James, and John would see Jesus shining with glory on a mountain; or toward the resurrection; or toward the fall of Jerusalem within that generation; or toward some further, fuller coming still ahead of us even now.
I don’t think we need to resolve that mystery this morning to hear what matters most in it: that the road to Jerusalem does not end at the cross.
It ends in glory.
The suffering Jesus describes in verse twenty-one is real, and it is not the last word.
Three days, Matthew’s Jesus insists, almost as an aside, almost too quickly for Peter to catch — and on the third day, raised.
This is the whole shape of the Christian life, laid out here in miniature: loss that is not final, suffering that does not have the last word, a cross that opens, on the far side, into resurrection glory.
We do not follow Jesus toward death for death’s sake.
We follow him through it, trusting that the one who calls us to lose our lives is the same one who has already walked that road ahead of us and come out the other side alive.
What This Asks of Us
So what do we do with this, sitting here, this morning, in our own ordinary lives, so far from Caesarea Philippi and so far, most days, from anything as dramatic as a literal cross?
I think it asks us, first, to notice our own Peter moments — the times when love for someone, or love for our own comfort, tempts us to talk ourselves or someone else out of the harder, truer path.
Peter’s rebuke came from love, and Jesus named it anyway for what it was.
We should ask, honestly: where in our lives are we offering easy comfort where God is asking for costly faithfulness?
Where are we, out of love, standing in the way of the very thing God is doing?
I think it asks us, second, to examine what we are actually protecting when we protect ourselves.
Not every act of self-care is the clenched fist Jesus warns against — Jesus himself withdrew to rest, to pray, to grieve.
But there is a difference between the rest that prepares us to give ourselves away and the grasping that refuses to give anything at all.
Denying ourselves does not mean despising ourselves.
It means no longer treating our own comfort, reputation, or security as the center of gravity around which every decision must revolve.
And I think it asks us, third, to trust the ledger Jesus is using rather than the one the world hands us.
The world’s ledger counts what you have kept.
The kingdom’s ledger counts what you have given away in love.
By the world’s math, the missionary who leaves comfort behind, the caregiver who spends herself for a parent or a child, the person who tells the truth at real cost to their own standing, the community that gives itself away for its neighbors instead of protecting its own institution — all of these look, on paper, like losses. Jesus says: that is exactly backward.
That is exactly the life that is found.
Conclusion
We began at Caesarea Philippi, at the mountaintop moment when Peter said the truest thing he had ever said.
We end on the road to Jerusalem, where that truth gets its full, costly shape.
Between those two points lies the whole mystery of discipleship: that the Christ we confess is not only the Christ of glory but the Christ of the cross, and that following him means walking the same road he walked — through loss, toward life; through the cross, toward glory; through the losing of ourselves, into the finding of who we actually are.
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
That is not a threat.
It is, in the end, a promise — from the one who lost his own life on that Jerusalem road and was raised on the third day, and who walks ahead of us still, calling us to take up our cross, deny ourselves, and follow him into a life we could never secure for ourselves, but that he is able, even now, to give.
Take up your cross — not your inconvenience, but the real possibility of losing everything for Christ’s sake.
And follow me — not follow at a comfortable distance, not follow when it is convenient, but follow toward Jerusalem.
The Strange Arithmetic of the Kingdom
And then comes the sentence that I think is the theological heart of this whole passage, the one that turns everything upside down and then, somehow, right side up:
“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?”
This is not a riddle for its own sake.
It is the deepest truth Jesus knows about the human soul, and it runs exactly counter to every instinct we have.
We are creatures built for self-preservation.
Every fiber of us is wired to protect, secure, insure, and hold on.
And Jesus says: that is precisely the strategy that will cost you your life.
The clenched fist cannot receive a gift.
The life spent guarding itself never actually gets lived.
I think of it sometimes like this: there are two ways to hold a life.
You can hold it like a fist, closed tight around what you have, protecting it from loss.
Or you can hold it like an open hand, offered outward, willing to let it go for something greater than itself.
The tragedy Jesus names is that the fist, for all its effort, cannot actually keep anything.
It can only grip tighter as everything it fears slips away anyway, because nothing in this world was ever ours to keep in the first place.
But the open hand — the life poured out in love, given away for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s — somehow, mysteriously, is the life that is found.
“What will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?”
I have sat with people at the end of long, successful, well-insured lives who could not answer that question.
I suspect most of us know, in our quieter moments, that the things we are most tempted to grasp — status, security, the approval of others, the illusion of control — are not the things that will have mattered when we come to the end of them.
Jesus is not romanticizing poverty or suffering here.
He is naming a spiritual law as real as gravity: a life organized around self-protection slowly suffocates, and a life given away for love finds itself, astonishingly, alive.
Glory on the Other Side
But — and this matters enormously — Jesus does not leave us on the cross.
He does not end this teaching with loss for loss’s own sake, as though suffering were the point.
He ends by lifting our eyes to the horizon:
“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.
Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
This is a hard verse, and honest preaching should say so.
Scholars have wrestled for centuries with what Jesus meant by “some standing here will not taste death” — whether he pointed toward the Transfiguration that Matthew places just six days later, when Peter, James, and John would see Jesus shining with glory on a mountain; or toward the resurrection; or toward the fall of Jerusalem within that generation; or toward some further, fuller coming still ahead of us even now.
I don’t think we need to resolve that mystery this morning to hear what matters most in it: that the road to Jerusalem does not end at the cross.
It ends in glory.
The suffering Jesus describes in verse twenty-one is real, and it is not the last word.
Three days, Matthew’s Jesus insists, almost as an aside, almost too quickly for Peter to catch — and on the third day, raised.
This is the whole shape of the Christian life, laid out here in miniature: loss that is not final, suffering that does not have the last word, a cross that opens, on the far side, into resurrection glory.
We do not follow Jesus toward death for death’s sake.
We follow him through it, trusting that the one who calls us to lose our lives is the same one who has already walked that road ahead of us and come out the other side alive.
What This Asks of Us
So what do we do with this, sitting here, this morning, in our own ordinary lives, so far from Caesarea Philippi and so far, most days, from anything as dramatic as a literal cross?
I think it asks us, first, to notice our own Peter moments — the times when love for someone, or love for our own comfort, tempts us to talk ourselves or someone else out of the harder, truer path.
Peter’s rebuke came from love, and Jesus named it anyway for what it was.
We should ask, honestly: where in our lives are we offering easy comfort where God is asking for costly faithfulness?
Where are we, out of love, standing in the way of the very thing God is doing?
I think it asks us, second, to examine what we are actually protecting when we protect ourselves.
Not every act of self-care is the clenched fist Jesus warns against — Jesus himself withdrew to rest, to pray, to grieve.
But there is a difference between the rest that prepares us to give ourselves away and the grasping that refuses to give anything at all.
Denying ourselves does not mean despising ourselves.
It means no longer treating our own comfort, reputation, or security as the center of gravity around which every decision must revolve.
And I think it asks us, third, to trust the ledger Jesus is using rather than the one the world hands us.
The world’s ledger counts what you have kept.
The kingdom’s ledger counts what you have given away in love.
By the world’s math, the missionary who leaves comfort behind, the caregiver who spends herself for a parent or a child, the person who tells the truth at real cost to their own standing, the community that gives itself away for its neighbors instead of protecting its own institution — all of these look, on paper, like losses. Jesus says: that is exactly backward.
That is exactly the life that is found.
Conclusion
We began at Caesarea Philippi, at the mountaintop moment when Peter said the truest thing he had ever said.
We end on the road to Jerusalem, where that truth gets its full, costly shape.
Between those two points lies the whole mystery of discipleship: that the Christ we confess is not only the Christ of glory but the Christ of the cross, and that following him means walking the same road he walked — through loss, toward life; through the cross, toward glory; through the losing of ourselves, into the finding of who we actually are.
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
That is not a threat.
It is, in the end, a promise — from the one who lost his own life on that Jerusalem road and was raised on the third day, and who walks ahead of us still, calling us to take up our cross, deny ourselves, and follow him into a life we could never secure for ourselves, but that he is able, even now, to give.
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