Matthew 16:20-28 - Homiletics

The cross.

I. THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF COMING SUFFERING .

1 . Lord. Two figures come prominently into contrast—the Lord and Peter: the Lord looking forwards with sweet and holy calmness to agony and shame and death; Peter, eager and impetuous, burning with zeal for what seemed to him his Master's honour. The Lord bade the apostles tell no man that he was the Christ. The people were not ready for the announcement; if they accepted it, they would in their present temper misunderstand it; they would again try to take him by force to make him a King. Let us learn of our dear Lord to be indifferent to titles, not to care to make known things that may bring us earthly honour. The Lord had received, as his due, the homage of St. Peter; he was the Christ, the Son of the living God. But while he accepted, as his by right, those loftiest of all conceivable titles, he prophesied the near approach of the extremest humiliation. He must go to Jerusalem; he must suffer many things; he must be killed. It must be, he said; it was necessary for the fulfilment of the Divine purpose, for the remission of sin, for the salvation of mankind. He must rise again the third day. He could not be holden of death, for he hath life in himself; he is the Life. The apostles did not understand him; they could not think that he was speaking literally; they could not believe that the Divine Messiah would suffer what seemed to them such utter degradation. And when it had come to pass, their misery and despondency were so great that they found no comfort in the prophecy of the resurrection; their horror and distress drove it quite out of their hearts. The Lord was graciously and tenderly preparing them for the coming trial. Let us prepare in the time of health and strength for what must come, sickness and pain and death; so by his grace may we be ready.

2 . Peter. He was impulsive, impetuous, as always. He took the Lord, caught him by the dress or hand; he ventured to rebuke him, as if he was wiser than the Christ. The Lord interrupted him; he would not allow him to proceed in his thoughtless talk; he sternly checked his improper freedom. "Get thee behind me, Satan," he said to the apostle whom not long before he had pronounced "blessed," to whom he had committed the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The Lord had used those same strong words once before. The evil spirit, whom he had foiled in the wilderness, was now tempting him again through the agency of Peter. Again the Lord repelled the temptation. It was the old temptation, the last of Satan's approaches in the wilderness ( Matthew 4:8 , Matthew 4:9 ), the temptation to wear the crown without bearing the cross; to take the kingdom which was his by right, but to take it without treading the path of suffering, the way ordained by God. Peter was a stumbling block now. Years afterwards, in his First Epistle ( 1 Peter 2:8 ), he described "the chief Cornerstone" (with a manifest allusion to this conversation) as being to the disobedient and unbelieving "a Rock of offence ( πε ì τρα σκανδα ì λου )." He was now making himself a stumbling block to Christ; he was minding, not the things of God, but the things of men. Men set their affections on earthly things, ease, comfort, honour, riches; these are not always good for us. Affliction, meekly borne, is better; it worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. Peter acted the tempter's part. Our kindest friends sometimes unwittingly do the like, when they dissuade us from enduring hardness, from making sacrifices for Christ's sake. Peter loved the Lord fervently, but his love was not wise. He was presumptuous, forward, even in some degree irreverent. Perhaps he was exalted above measure by the Lord's commendation, as St. Paul thought he himself might have been through the abundance of the revelations ( 2 Corinthians 12:7 ). There is no safety without humility; the nearer we draw to Christ, the more we need to learn of him that most precious grace.

II. THE DISCIPLE MUST FOLLOW THE MASTER 'S STEPS .

1 . The daily cross of self-denial. The Lord had told the apostles of his own coming sufferings; now he warns them that those sufferings must, in some sense, repeat themselves in all his faithful followers, he speaks to all. " If any man willeth to come after me," he said. There must be the wish first. There is no perseverance in religion without desire, without longing, without love. "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness." They who do not hunger are not filled. Again, the true Christian wish is to come after Christ. All men wish, more or less earnestly, more or less languidly, to get to heaven at last. That wish is, as many entertain it, utterly selfish. The Christian wishes to come after Christ, and, following Christ here, to be at last with him there. To come after Christ, then, is the central wish of the Christian life, and the means by which that wish is realized is self-denial. Christ pleased not himself; his disciples must follow him. The true self is the conscience; but the lower part of our nature, the appetites and affections which we share with the rest of the animal creation, are so noisy and turbulent, fill so large a part of our conscious existence (in many men, alas! almost the whole), that they seem to be the self, and usurp the name of self, which properly belongs to the higher self, the conscience and the reason. It is the lower self which we must deny. When appetite says, "This is pleasant," but conscience answers, "It is wrong," then we must take part with conscience, which bears in itself the evidence of authority, and deny that lower self which would disturb the harmony of our nature by usurping the position of command which does not belong to it. The precept is one of paramount importance. The Lord repeats it, translating it now into the distinctive language of Christianity, "Let him take up his cross." He had used those words once already ( Matthew 10:38 ). It was long, probably, before the apostles understood them. We know their meaning now. The cross was a thing of horror once; but the exceeding great love of our Master and only Saviour Jesus Christ has shed a halo of resplendent light around the tree of shame. The word has changed its meaning; it has become a name for the noblest self-denial, the most Divine self-sacrifice. Not all acts of self-denial are a bearing of the cross, but only those which spring out of faith in Christ, and radiate from the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. He taketh up his cross who denies himself daily in the faith of Christ, and for the sake of Christ, seeking only to please him and to be made more and more like unto him. Such acts of holy self-denial are taken up, so to speak, into the one great act of holiest self sacrifice, and become parts of it ( Colossians 1:24 ), and derive their beauty and glory from the reflected glory of the Saviour's cross. Such faithful Christians, whom the strong wish to come after Christ urges with ever growing earnestness to take up their cross daily, will follow him who bore the cross for them along the narrow way till they appear, sealed with the seal of the living God upon their foreheads, before the glory throne.

2 . The true life. The wish which is centred in this present life is opposed to the Christian wish to come after Christ. When the heart is set upon the things of this life, comfort, station, wealth, and such like, it loses sight of Christ, who is the Life of men. Therefore he who willeth, whose set purpose is, to save this life, with all its treasures, must lose the true Life, which is Christ. For the Lord died upon the cross. His first followers shrank not from the death of martyrdom for his sake. All true Christians must have the martyr spirit; they must be martyrs in will; they must be willing, if need be, to lose all earthly things, even life itself, for Christ's sake. The Lord gave himself for us. He asks for our whole self in return. We must keep nothing back, or we shall lose the true life, which is the life in Christ—eternal life, Christ himself. And if this is lost, all is lost. Nothing can compensate a man for the loss of the true life. No gain, not even the gain of the whole world, if it were possible, can balance that tremendous loss. For the loss is real, but the gain illusory. A man may seem to gain all that the world prizes; but if with that gain the true life is lost, there is no true joy, no brightness, no abiding gladness. And all that was gained, though it seemed like all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, must vanish in a moment when the years come to an end as it were a tale that is told. Then what shall a man give in exchange for his life, when the true life is lost, and only that life, which is living death, remains? What shall a man give then, when he hath naught to give; when his riches, and his knowledge, and his strength, and his earthly rank, and the time given him for working out his own salvation, and all his opportunities of serving God and doing the work which God had given him to do, have passed away forever;—when all these things have fallen away from him and left him all desolate and alone, a poor soul, helpless and destitute, realizing, when it is too late, the bitter truth that it is in the sight of God wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked—what shall a man give then? Let him learn to give now—to give his heart, and, with his heart, his time, his labour, his prayers, his earthly goods. It is a poor gift at the best; but if it is given in faith and love, it is lent unto the Lord, and the Lord will repay with large increase in the great day of account. We are unprofitable servants; the best of us only do what is our bounden duty; we only give him what is his own. But he is pleased in his gracious condescension to accept this poor service of ours, and to give us in return that far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, that eternal life which is the gift of God.

3 . The end. "The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels." He is the Son of man in virtue of his incarnation; but in his essential Being he is God, equal with the Father as touching his Godhead. The Father's glory is his; the angels of God are his angels, for "all things that the Father hath are mine" ( John 16:15 ). Then he shall reward every man according to his work, his work as a whole. The award will be proportioned to the whole scope and meaning of each man's earthly life in infinite justice, and, blessed be his holy Name, in infinite mercy. He bids us to look ever forward to the coming of that great day, and to estimate things in reference to the coming judgment. The glory of the world seems now, to our short-sighted eyes, very great and magnificent and overpowering. But look at it in the fierce light that streams from the judgment throne; then it shrinks into nothingness. Its brightness is like the poor little candle in the effulgent radiance of the noontide sun; you see that its beauty is marred with the traces of decay, rottenness, death. "The world passeth away … but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." Let us not lose that eternal life for the sake of this fleeting, dying world. For the Son of man cometh in his kingdom. There were some, the Lord said, standing there who should see that kingdom before they died. Three of them soon saw the transfigured Saviour in his glory. All, save one, saw the risen Lord, victorious over death, manifested as the Lord of life, the everlasting King, to whom all power in heaven and in earth is given. Some of them, we know not how many, saw the manifestation of his power in the destruction of Jerusalem; when the old dispensation made way for the kingdom of heaven, the one Catholic Church over which Christ shall reign as King until the end cometh; then, on the ruins of the old theocracy, was established that spiritual kingdom which shall reach its consummation in the day of the Lord. In each of these great events the Lord's prediction was in some sense fulfilled. If we cannot define its meaning to our complete satisfaction, let us remember what he said of the last survivor of the apostles, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me."

LESSONS .

1 . The cross is the very emblem of our religion; he is no true Christian who beareth not the cross.

2 . The whole world is worth nothing to him whose soul is lost. No price can redeem the lost soul. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."

3 . The judgment is at hand. Think of this life in the light of the judgment. "Love not the world."