Jesus said to his disciples, 'The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, but on the third day he will rise again. And he said to the crowd, "Whoever wishes to follow me, let him reject himself and take up his cross and follow me daily." For whoever will save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is it to a man who loses himself or gains the whole world?' (Luke 9:22-25)

Jesus speaks to two distinct groups here, his close confidants and the general people. To the first he discloses his destiny in both its horror and its glory. Everything we flinch from, suffering, rejection and death. Being raised up is left unexplained. These are two hard contradictions, as in our own lives we find it hard to see disappointment and failure as a means to fulfilment. This cannot be how the God of reward and punishment we like to think of operates. So, we turn away from the narrow path to seek a more comfortable one. There’s nothing we value more than comfort.

Next, on the unwashed multitude, he bestows the uncomforting truth of radical renunciation as the way of living into this dilemma and turning the contradiction into a paradox. Paradoxes are portals into another worldview. To pass through them is metanoia. Paradoxes are not ideas but experiences, like the person you love dying and realising love still unites you. Or things falling apart with an almost absurd totality, one thing after another as they did for Job, and yet leading to an unpredictable wholeness. 

Pema Chodron’s great work ‘When Things Fall Apart’ describes this. I was once at a conference with her when we were asked what led us into the monastic life. Her story could not have been bettered. She was working in the front yard of their suburban house one day when her husband drove in. He told her he was having an affair and was leaving her. She grabbed for the nearest thing to throw at his head which was a brick. Fortunately, she missed. From what she learned after this, she describes the way to deal with collapse and dissolution is not to deny or avoid but to plunge into them. Then loss, suffering, rejection and death reveal the portal that irresistibly invites you to pass through. 

The ordinary people, the second group Jesus addresses in this gospel, knew him as a healer and a denouncer of corruption and injustice. Now they hear the hidden teaching made open: in the portal of transformation, where the material becomes transparent, we renounce not just possessions, not only the hurts and wounds we bear from life, but the victim, the craver and the possessor, the ego itself. To do so we may need immense love and support and patience. But he leaves us to conclude ‘what, actually, in the end, is the alternative?’

Laurence Freeman