Bible Study Notes: St Luke's Gospel
Session 23 Chapter 9: 1-5, 18-27
Jesus Trains His Evangelizers (Luke. 9:1-5)
Lose the Self. Take the Cross. Follow Jesus. (Luke. 9:18-27)
Luke connects the first prediction of the passion with this scene of the bread miracle and its Eucharistic symbolism. The celebration of the Eucharist is an occasion of table fellowship and the growth of Christian community. But the Eucharist also makes present the saving sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. St. Paul taught this very explicitly. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes" (I Cor. 11:26). The Eucharist is therefore a sacrament that both illumines and enables Christian fellowship and mysteriously makes the effective presence and power of the cross available to the participants. Luke also ties the first prediction of the passion to the confession of Peter and a description of Christian discipleship, Jesus and the apostles had sought solitude for time to pray. In that environment of prayer Jesus asked the apostles who people thought he was. They answered that the crowds varied in their responses, some saying he was John the Baptist, or Elijah or some other prophet come back from the dead. Luke notes that Herod heard the same opinions (9:7-9). Jesus asked the apostles their own judgement. Peter spoke up for them, saying Jesus was "The Messiah of God" (verse 20).
Having made a prediction of his passion, Jesus went on to describe what it meant to be his disciple. Essentially, discipleship contains three elements: (1) Lose yourself. (2) Take your cross. (3) Follow Jesus. They would have to follow the same path he walked. Lose Your Self. This advice seems strange, even forbidding, to a culture that struggles with what is called the "self-worth problem." Again and again therapists point out that low self esteem is at the root of many addictions such as alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as the cycle of child abuse and other intractable personal problems. How can we be called to lose a self that is already shaky and in need of nourishment and affirmation?
Jesus would be just as compassionate and sensitive as we are to the self-worth difficulties. He said himself that the healthy do not need a doctor. The sick do. His healing ministry addressed that need. How often he said after a miracle that the person cured had been made "whole." Once wholeness had been achieved, then the person could be invited to discipleship. Today, Jesus would say that the first step is to make a person whole by creating a strong valuing of the self, using both therapeutic and spiritual means, the latter helping a person appreciate having a self made in God's image of love and beauty. The person whose self esteem is restored is ready for the path of discipleship.
A second problem raised by Christ's call to lose the self is the negative way of denial of self that seems morbid to many people. This bruises the modern sensibility. Examples of asceticism drawn from the lives of Christian disciples in other ages of church history repel rather than attract today's believers. Such spiritual lifestyles do not appeal even to the most idealistic of today's Christians.
The problem with that model is that, rightly or wrongly, it seems too negative. Is there not a positive method for following Christ's call? Is it possible any longer? Yes, when the path of discipleship is seen as self-transcendence. This means letting go of that side of the self that draws us away from love. With God's help we must transcend the aspects of self that impede the growth of love and the liberating impact of God's grace. In this pursuit we may not be adopting the punishing asceticism of the past, but we will still have a difficult, challenging, demanding lifestyle. That is why Jesus spoke of the cross.
Take Your Cross. Jesus invites us to take the hero journey to the cross and resurrection. Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved easily. As the T-shirts on ski slopes say, "No guts - No glory." It is not easy to let go of sin or selfishness. The asceticism of letting go is one of the most difficult challenges that face us. My nature fears conversion and change. I am afraid I will be changed to someone who is not me. I must become convinced that love will change me into who I really am.
The cross asks us to leave self behind so that we can live lives of self-less relationships and self-less responsibility. Our concentration shifts from the self to the other, and ultimately to the greatest of all others, Jesus Christ. At first this feels like it is too much to give up. We hate it. We fear it. But when we transcend our fear and hate, we discover the real selves God has buried deep within us.
These are the selves of power, the selves of love, the selves of responsibility. Living in contact with original love - that from God - makes us feel we are experiencing a perpetual Easter. Our superficial selves felt inadequate, ever battling the forces of distraction and destruction. When we transcend them, we sink deep inside to the still point, the place of the real self that draws powerful love from God. We are at the fountain of the greatest creativity and the deepest concentration. Then we praise God for the gift of the glorious cross that made this possible.
Follow Me. The third step of discipleship is following Christ. We have already done this by transcending ourselves and taking up the cross. Following Jesus means leaning upon him alone. We come to the point where we trust absolutely in him and surrender to his plans for us. We let go out of own plans for holiness and listen for Christ's guidance. Even when we feel a sense of a loss of direction, we rest in Christ without fail.
We avoid trying to control Christ's actions and give up the desire to know exactly where we are on the faith journey. We ask to be an ideal disciple, but we leave it to Jesus to determine what kind of disciple that will be. We surrender to Jesus because Jesus has surrendered himself to us. Jesus loved us without reserve. We reply with as much love as we can in a similar manner. We let go of our selves so that Jesus can live for us. We stop possessing even our souls, for Christ's love possesses them instead.
© Fr Michael Fuller: November 2009