“No one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence… death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, facing execution in a Nazi concentration camp during WW II, for plotting against Adolf Hitler.
The response to the Peter’s bold proclamation of Jesus as the Christ (Matthew 16:16) is anything but expected. His followers expected Jesus to come out powerfully against the Roman oppressors. However, there were no parades, no debutante balls, no speeches, no shouts of “death to God’s enemies!”, nor grandiose displays of ethereal power.
Instead, the disciples receive harsh warnings to tell no one that He is the Christ (v.20). Jesus calls Peter, “Satan” (v.23) and here He gives a call to take up our cross and die. Is this the sort of God worth following? “Jesus, we can’t sell books and sermons with this kind of defeatist talk!”
In this passage, Jesus is not promising heaven on earth; rather He is pointing His disciples to a MUCH GREATER reality, an eternal perspective of EVERLASTING joy! His call is to persevere, suffer and lay down our lives as we love, serve and bless others and give away our lives. Christ’s call is that our treasure, our hope, our joy is fixed not on this temporal world but on our eternity with Him.
The freedom and the joy in Christianity comes when we are mindful of who we serve. We serve the Christ, the Son of the Living God (v.16). We serve the Son of Man who will judge the world (v.27). And soon and very soon every human will see Christ glorified (17:2-3). For some this will lead to terror; for others, to indescribable joy.
Let us remember: we serve Christ; He does not serve us. Run from churches promising you health and wealth; by-pass authors who reduce Jesus to merely a spiritual guru, guiding you to a better life. Jesus does not beckon us to a “better” life; He beckons us to come and die; to die to this world, its expectations, its pain, and its futility.
Once again, my favorite theologian, John Piper: “Christians [need to be] committed to great causes, not great comforts. I pleaded with the saints to dream a dream bigger than themselves and their families and their churches. [Commit to] the great causes of mercy and justice in a prejudiced, pain-filled, and perishing world.” (World Magazine, February 23, 2002, p. 37)
Because eternity awaits us, because the glorified Jesus is the Master we serve, let us take great risks! Let us lay aside this world, which we will lose anyway and let us take up our cross and follow Him. What will profit us if we gain the world yet lose our souls? Lets follow His call to take the gospel to places where Christ is not known and where great danger and opposition await us. We need fewer Christians intent on living long lives and more Christians intent on dying purposeful deaths.
Charles Spurgeon, a London preacher from the 1800s said this: "It is our duty and our privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men in fine preservation, but living sacrifices, whose lot is to be consumed." (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 157)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor during WW II who did not bend to Hitler’s reign of terror. Hitler had him arrested and deported to a concentration camp. Bonhoeffer, in spite of the conditions, would not recant his opposition to Hitler. On April 9, 1945, just three weeks before Hitler killed himself, Hitler had Bonhoeffer executed. The doctor at the concentration camp who certified Bonhoeffer’s death, said, “In the almost fifty years that I have worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” (Bonhoeffer, by Eric Metaxes)
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