To Follow the Christ - Reflections on Matthew 16:21-28, Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Friday, June 19, 2026
In many ways, this passage is among the most important in Matthew’s Gospel. He follows closely his Markan model (Mark 8:27-9:1), including Mark’s pattern of Jesus’s identity, his passion prediction, and his instruction on the way to discipleship. Of course, Matthew radically changes Mark only at the extended Petrine confession (Mt.16:16b-19), a series of words that has had the most profound impact on the practice of what became Roman Catholicism over the past two millennia. We addressed something of that crucial idea in last week’s look at the lectionary. Today, I want to focus on Matthew’s emphasis on the difficult way to discipleship. It has to do with “taking up one’s cross.”
As I just noted, Matthew begins this central pericope of his Gospel with Peter’s revelation of Jesus as God’s Messiah (16:16). After the lengthy statement of the uniqueness of Peter’s role in the ongoing life of the community (Mt.16:17-19), finally Matthew adds the warning that the disciples “should tell no one that he was the Messiah” (Mt.16:20). This is quite different from Mark’s presentation of the scene. There, Peter blurts out that Jesus is Messiah, but immediately Jesus “sternly orders them not to tell anybody about him” (Mark 8:30). Though the shape of the scene is differently presented, still the effect is the same: the disciples are demanded to remain silent about the reality of Jesus’ messiahship. Why?
In both Gospels, the next verses will make clear just why the disciples must not tell what Peter has claimed. The fear is, and must have been a fear among the Matthean and Markan communities, that few if any will understand precisely what it means for Jesus to be named Messiah. Many notions of what the Messiah was to do and be were around at the time, from military hero, to spiritual guru, to fabled magician, among others. Jesus is said first to lay to rest any of these notions of his Messiahship, by announcing that he must undergo rejection in Jerusalem, must suffer a cruel death, and will then be raised to new life (Mt.16:21). Peter, that supposed “rock” of the new community, is having none of that! “Peter took hold of him and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘May God be gracious to you, Lord! (A more literal reading of NRSV’s and others’ “God forbid!”) This will not be so for you!’” (Mt.16:22). Peter then receives the full weight of Jesus’s anger. “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me because you think the things not of God but of humans” (Mt.16:23). Only in Matthew do we get a direct address of Jesus to Peter, and only in Matthew does Jesus accuse Peter of being a “stumbling block” (Greek scandalon). Matthew thus greatly emphasizes the fact of Peter’s thorough confusion about just what sort of Messiah Jesus will be.
And then follows the instruction to the disciples concerning what they (and we!) must do if we are to be followers of this Messiah. “If anyone wishes to come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (Mt.16:24). Let us examine this crucial verse more closely. If we are to follow, we must first “deny ourselves.” Christianity has long been seen as a faith that calls for thinking of others first, to be outer directed, to imagine that others are to be cared for before oneself. Granted, this idea has too often been perverted into some sort of masochism, where a wife must always submit to her abusing husband, because “his needs” always come first. It does not mean that at all. It means primarily that self-assertion, self-love, self-aggrandizement must give way to concern for others. Narcissists need not apply. I am reminded of the clever snake in the Garden of Eden in Gen.3, who seduces the woman into believing that if she eats from the famous fruit of the special tree, she will be “God-like,” knowing everything, completely self-sufficient in all things. This notion leads to the sewing of fig-leaves as the initial act of so-called “divine knowledge,” and many Middle-Easterners, and more than a few of us, know what fig leaves feel like—number two-grade sandpaper, hardly the right item to cover one’s nakedness!
After serious self-denial, then Jesus bids us to “take up our cross.” Good grief, why would we ever do that?! Crosses are heavy, ugly, filthy, splintery things, instruments of cruel Roman torture. Far from taking one up, we would run from them as far as we can. Yet, we, if we have denied ourselves, can see a world filled with crosses: climate change, vast gulfs between rich and poor, cruelty against those who are not like us, among many others. Crosses abound in our world, and Jesus calls us to take one or more up. After we have denied self, after we have hefted our cross, then, says Jesus, we will be followers of him. He adds, “Whoever wishes to save life will lose it; whoever loses life for my sake will find it” (Mt.16:25). Discipleship is a hard road, a potentially painful journey, but on that road we will in the end find our lives, all the while thinking we are losing our lives. It is the central conundrum of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the ultimate new way to discern the truth of our lives. We do not find Jesus by means of power, or earthly success, or vast wealth, or great authority. Giving to others, serving the earth, sharing what we have, are the ways to find the life that Jesus offers. Matthew makes this fact plain, and those who would be Christians in this world have long sought the ways to make this strange way real for them. This is finally the way to become a true follower of Jesus.