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. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 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.”
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 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?”
“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.”
Matthew 16:21-28
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:21
Last week, the kids around here went back to school, like many parts of the country, and some are going off to college with tons of pressure. Recent research said 56% of teens feel like they’re supposed to have their future figured out. I remember being 15 and my parents taking me to a career counseling center, where they had us do the Myers-Briggs test and a bunch of other questionnaires to help us answer: what is your calling? Yes, lad, you may have dreamed of astronaut or athlete or rock star, but have you considered corporate bankruptcy law?
As more and more things get replaced by technology and AI and all that, younger generations are struggling even more to find their calling. “What’s the point of doing what a machine can do better? Where can I go that won’t replace me? What actually moves me? What is the point of anything?” You may have a young person in your life thinking of that. You may be thinking of that. You may have already completed five or fifty different purposes and meanings, and now you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. “What has God apportioned me with the time I have here? Who is he calling me to be? Where is he calling me to go?”
Of course, we probably have multiple callings and purposes going on at once. I know and am grateful for the new, greatest calling I’ve ever had in my life of being a father. I could not be more excited for that call. But what if God is calling us to something that we don’t really want to do? Not just a different job, but something right at your pride. Imagine if you went to the career counselor and it was an angel from God himself, as if you were in the pages of the Bible, and the angel tells you: “I know you think you really want to do (checks notes) corporate bankruptcy law…but actually, God is calling you to own up and make repairs for all the mistakes you’ve made. Sorry!”
Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to the call God has for us is the call that we want to have for ourselves. If it feels like, ah, great coincidence, God is calling me to exactly what I felt like doing anyway—take a beat. But also, even if we pursue the wrong call, or the right call for the wrong reasons, God can eventually work with that if you let him (take it from someone who was convinced he had a calling at least five different times that never went how he wished). When the disciples began, they must have felt so good to be called by Jesus and named by him as his special twelve. What an honor. So what’s in store, Jesus? James and John thought glory, honor, power.
In our reading today, Jesus tells them what his own calling is: “[I] 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.” (Matt 16:21) And as soon as he says this, Jesus is tempted again, not in the desert, but now by Peter, “God forbid, Jesus!” And we get that famous line, the harshest rebuke Jesus makes, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” I think he reacts like this because the temptation must have been so great in that moment to agree with Peter. Yes, God had called him to be the Messiah, but what God was calling him to was not to the world’s power and might. There was another call inside the call, and that’s one none of us want: you are going to have to suffer for the sake of others. There is no free lunch and there is no free Messiah. Grace is free—so, so free. But discipleship is not.
And so, Jesus tells them all, and tells us all: “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matt 16:24-25) And as he would go on to teach and reveal, it is not just that you are being called to suffer, my disciples, but you are being called to suffer for the sake of others and in the right way. Are you going to suffer with love for God and love for your neighbor intact? Or are you going to suffer in a way that causes more pain for others? Are we going to avoid the suffering that is needed so that somebody else deals with it, so we can do what we feel like and say God approves? Or do we listen to the call inside the call?
Now if we struggle with what the still, small voice of the Spirit is calling us to do, not only is that nothing to feel ashamed about, but that may even be a sign that it is a real calling. The things that feel easy can just be a preference, our flesh talking, our personality enjoying life. But the things that we know we ought to do, but don’t want to, will have the Holy Spirit working and gnawing at you, wrestling with us until we let God bless us.
Jeremiah didn’t want to accept his calling. Not at the start of his prophecy, when he said, “I am just a boy, I can’t speak for you,” and God said, “That’s not a problem, I’ll put the words in your mouth.” (Jer 1) And Jeremiah does God’s will for a while. But he keeps coming back to God with some complaints. “Why am I suffering and the wicked prospering? I’m doing what you said.” He even gets so mad at God that today in our reading he says, “God, the pain that I have endured for your sake is so great, you’re like a river who doesn’t have water, but a river of lies!” (Jer 15:18) And God says, “Okay, that’s a bit much, Jeremiah…but I will still take you back. And I will send you back out to say the hard things that you really don’t want to say and they don’t want to hear, but I will make you stronger than you even know you can be, for I will be with you.” And Jeremiah returns to being a prophet, threatened, jailed, and hated for doing God’s calling. But God is with him.
Eventually, the disciples did answer the call too. Oh, they immediately answered the call they thought they had to be in the in-crowd, Jesus’ deputies. What honor! But now they know, “Oh…here’s the call that’s actually at the bottom of this.” As if Jesus had told them, “You’re excited to be a father? Great, here’s the diapers.”
We want to be a prophet and tell the world how messed up it is and how much God is on our side, but we don’t want the part where God says, “You need to apologize for the thing you said, because you don’t always speak for me.” We want to be a king like David, but like David, we don’t want to be accountable to the law. We want to be a holy, spiritual person for the vibes, but you don’t want to do the right but hard thing when it would ruin your reputation as an enlightened being. We don’t want the call inside the call. But that is, to use Bonhoeffer’s term, the cost of discipleship.
And maybe the disciples wouldn’t have followed if they had known the cost. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell them right away. But he’s telling them now. Maybe you didn’t know the cost when you signed up for your call. But now Jesus is telling people who follow him, “Yes, you are loved, and you are redeemed, and you are mine. You’ve been saved for free; you can’t earn my love. I just love you. And you have a purpose. What you do matters and means something. I have use for you. But know that if you want to keep walking with me, there is going to be a cross. But you will not be alone. I am walking with you. And you will carry more than you possibly knew you could.”
There’s one more crucial thing, though. There is a version of a discipleship of “doing hard things” that looks like the logic of the world. Try harder, build more, get stronger, be a martyr, outsmart your enemies so you can defeat them. And maybe your enemies “deserve” to be defeated because they don’t care what’s true, what’s right, what’s good, what’s fair, and you feel God is calling you to oppose them. If so—and God truly may be calling you to that—take one more beat. In opposing the evils of the world, is there one more call inside the call?
“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:17-21)
That may be the heaviest cross you ever bear. I’m preaching this and I already feel like I’m going to fail at it this week. I’m not proud of that, just being honest that God has more work on me to do. We let God work on us through sustained, patient, faithful discipleship that slowly forms us more into the Way of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the one who bore a cross that was not a cross of pointless suffering with no meaning, but one that led to true life. Your cross is not an extra requirement on top of the gospel to be saved. But it is how Jesus says we can be in communion with him in this life, to bear each other’s burdens, to love when we do not feel like loving. And when we mess up, he loves us anyway and says, “Let’s begin again.”
A lot of people are preaching about Dolly Parton today—actually, it’s kind of weird, but I’m sure there are many people simultaneously talking about Dolly Parton in a pulpit somewhere right this very second. I was thinking about her this week, and everyone was remarking how unusual, in our current era, that this woman was so beloved by everyone—from Southerners to Northerners, from Trump to the Democratic Socialists, even a North Korean dictator appeared to post a eulogy for Dolly (sadly, I discovered this was satire—but the fact that it seemed possible is a testimony itself). So I thought, man, Dolly, how do you love your enemies if you don’t have any?
But believe it or not, Dolly did once have at least one enemy. She got her big break on the Porter Wagoner Show, and he was her mentor, close friend, collaborator in a love for country music. Eventually she wanted to go her own way, and this upset him, and there’s all kinds of articles about this, but the fracturing was already so painful that she wrote “I Will Always Love You” to try to make peace with him, and he loved it, but then he sued her anyway. She settled to avoid more drama. Thirty years go by, and whatever had happened by then, Porter Wagoner was dying of lung cancer. And the one public enemy of Dolly Parton had a visitor: Dolly Parton. They prayed, said goodbye, and she sang his favorite, “There’ll Always Be Music.” He died hours later.
The cross of Jesus Christ was a cross of forgiveness. Maybe the cross of that kind of forgiveness feels impossible to you. Maybe it would be impossible by yourself. But you’re not. You have a calling. But you also have a calling inside the calling. And you have a God who suffers with you, rejoices with you, calls you, and will lift you up when you call on him. Amen.
