Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them,“Who do people say I am?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

–Mark 8.27-36 (NIV)

In today’s passage, we gain insight into what kind of Messiah (God’s anointed One) Jesus is and what we must do to follow him. As Mark makes clear in the exchange between Jesus and his disciples, especially Peter, Jesus wasn’t the kind of Messiah they were expecting and things haven’t changed a lot since then. Jesus continues to violate our expectations of him. He still refuses to allow us to make him into our own image. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when that happens. But as Mark also makes clear, everyone of us must ultimately make a decision about who Jesus is–right, wrong, or indifferent–and what we decide will have both present and eternal ramifications for us.

We have immediate empathy for Peter in this story because he is us. Aided by the Holy Spirit, Peter initially gets it. He tells Jesus he is the Messiah or Christ, God’s anointed One whom the Jews expected to usher in the the Messianic Age, an era in which God finally would put to right all that had gone wrong with his creation. We can just see Peter now. He’s guessed who Jesus really is and as Matthew tells us in his account, this earned his master’s praise. And because Peter thought he got it right and received high marks from the Teacher, he was probably full of himself. Sound familiar?

But then Jesus does the strangest thing. He warns the disciples not to tell anyone about his real identity (although Mark has already spilled the beans in the very first verse of his Gospel) an then begins to describe a kind of Messiah that most of his disciples would not have recognized. Instead of presenting himself as a political and military figure who would kick out the Romans and restore Israel to her rightful place in God’s Kingdom (i.e., at the head of the class)–the kind of Messiah most Jews expected–Jesus draws on the Suffering Servant model that we find in Isaiah 53.

Once again we can have great empathy for Peter and his reaction to this news. Surely he loved Jesus and did not wish to see harm come to him. Surely he got a bit uppity when his messianic expectations were violated, and who wouldn’t? After all, think of the times when your expectations about someone had been violated in a negative sense. How did you feel? And so Peter protests to Jesus. “Stop talking nonsense, Jesus! Everybody knows this isn’t what is going to happen to the real Messiah! Have you lost your mind??”

But Jesus had heard this before in the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan. Satan himself had tried to persuade him to avoid the cross so that humanity would continue to be lost and alienated from God. When we understand this piece of Jesus’ background, we can better understand his violent reaction toward Peter’s well-intentioned but fatally flawed protest.

Why is this important for us to understand clearly? Because Jesus expects us to be just like him. He understood that it is only through suffering that we will inherit the glory of God’s promised New Creation, an inheritance that will last for an eternity.  And so Jesus stops to tell us what it will cost us to gain real life. We will have to obey him by becoming just like him in all that he does. We will have to deny ourselves, take up our cross (Luke tells us we will have to do this every day), and follow Jesus.

What does that mean? In Galatians 5.19-21, Paul gives us a glimpse of what denying self and taking up our cross will look like. We will have to overcome our desire to have casual sex and reserve that for marriage. We will need to refrain from having our own way all the time. We’ll have to give up anything that interferes (or potentially interferes) with our ultimate allegiance to Jesus–our anger, our hatred, our drunkenness, our false religions and spiritualities in whatever guise they may take, our envy, our selfish ambitions.

The list is endless and Paul’s list in Galatians is not meant to be exhaustive or complete. Instead, Paul is reminding us that we are going to have to kill everything in us that is unholy in God’s sight (or as Jesus says, deny ourselves) if we ever wish to have a real and lasting relationship with God because the Holy cannot abide having the unholy in its Presence. None of these things in us is easy to ditch because they are manifestations of our fallen and sinful nature. In fact, if I am representative of the human race, they are downright impossible to kill if I have to kill them by my own strength.

The good news, however, is that none of us has to deny ourselves by ourselves. We have the power of the Holy Spirit living in us helping us to do the slow, difficult, and painful work. But why would we want to bother in the first place? I mean, really.

Just this. The rewards of doing so far outweigh the costs. Our time of struggle and suffering for Jesus’ sake is minuscule compared to the eternity of joy that awaits us.

But we don’t have to wait to die to enjoy the benefits of denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Jesus. They are available to us right now. What are those benefits? Paul calls them the “fruit of the Spirit,” which includes living a life characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5.22-25). In other words you will be living life as God intended you to live and in doing so you will find out how empty were the other, lesser things you were pursuing but which you thought would bring you ultimate meaning, purpose, and happiness.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. “Let me get this straight, Jesus. You want me to give up the joys of casual sex, drunkenness (you know, all the fun times I’ve had waking up the next morning in a strange bed or place and not remembering how I got there or what I did the night before and feeling, well, a little stupid and embarrassed about the whole thing), holding a grudge against those who have done me wrong, deficit spending in pursuit of toys and material things that bring me about a day’s worth of pleasure, arguing with others just for the fun of it and then belittling those with whom I disagree? Stuff like that? Really Jesus?”

Well, yes. But it gets worse. Following Jesus means that we are going to have to take some unpopular stands in our culture and not go with the flow. We are going to have to take stands that will cause others to call us hateful, intolerant, bigoted, stupid, unenlightened, and a whole lot more. We are going to have to deny our natural desires to be liked by everyone and our need to be popular and feel accepted (but notice in this context on whose terms our popularity and acceptance are based; helpful hint: it ain’t ours).

But if we stop and really think about it, if we are really honest with ourselves, we know that in our heart of hearts these things can never, ever ultimately satisfy us because they are the things of a world that is openly hostile to God. They are things that can never give us life or raise us from the dead. I can tell you, for example, if you have ever come close to experiencing the peace of God, it is like nothing you will ever experience in this life and you will never be able to get enough of it. If you have ever loved and were loved (and I am not talking necessarily about romantic or sexual love), you can never get enough of it. And who among us does not crave joy and goodness in our lives? Who among us except the most utterly depraved and perverted do not want our relationships to be characterized by faithfulness and gentleness? Who among us does not admire the trait of patience, especially when someone else extends it to us when we act ugly toward them? No, if we are really honest with ourselves, it is the fruit of the Spirit we crave most rather than the desires of our fallen nature.

But this all comes at a cost, the cost of our fallen, ugly selves. I am not talking about violating our core personality. God does not want that. What I am talking about is all the ugliness that bubbles up from our broken selves, our bodies of flesh that weigh us down. It requires radical surgery to kill it all off and we will spend a lifetime doing so, and then only with the help of the Spirit in us. There will be setbacks and detours along the way. We will encounter opposition from within ourselves, from our friends and neighbors, from our enemies, and yes, from Satan himself. But we have a secret weapon that gives us the upper hand. We have a relationship with the Lord of the universe, Jesus himself, and if we do our part in staying the course, he will not let us be ultimately defeated. We may lose some (or even many) battles along the way but we will not lose the war.

This is what it means to follow Jesus. It is not for the faint-hearted or queasy. We cannot be casual followers of Jesus because he loves us passionately and wants all of us, warts and all, so that he can transform us into the humans God intends for us to be. But as we have seen, the rewards are infinitely greater. We will get to live life here in our mortal bodies as God intended, albeit imperfectly. And at the end of the day, we will get to live forever in God’s promised New Creation, directly in his Presence. God’s space will be our space and we will get to experience healing, restoration, and redemption that we can only attempt to imagine or dare dream about. Take the risk. Take a chance on Jesus. Ask him to help you die so that you can start to really live.