NEW TESTAMENT CONTEXTUAL COMMENTARY

by Dr. Robert R. Seyda

GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Part VIII

Verse 24: Then Jesus said to His followers, “If any of you want to be my follower, you must stop thinking about yourself and what you want. You must be willing to carry the execution stake that is given to you for following me.”

The earliest Hebrew version of Matthew renders this verse this way: “Whoever wishes to come after [follow] me let him despise himself, take the cross, that is, offer himself unto death, and come after [follow] me.”¹ Another Jewish translation has: “If anyone wants to come after me, let him say ‘No’ to himself, take up his execution-stake, and keep following me.”² In these two renderings it appears that giving one’s life for a cause was known as the ultimate sacrifice in loyalty and bravery for the cause. Such deaths were common in that era, and being executed on a stake was also well documented.

So when we look back at verse 21, we should take this reference as being to His cross in particular, and His willingness to die for what He came to do. So these disciples were put on notice that by committing themselves to follow Him, it might someday cost them their lives. So Jesus wanted them to know that now was the time to either indicate that they were sold out to Him, or go back to fishing if they were not sure. He will make this even clearer in the next verse.

When it comes to the cross, Jewish scholars tell us that the cross was so familiar to the Jews in New Testament times that they spoke frequently of “men carrying their cross before them while going to be executed.”³ For instance, we read such a reference when the writer talks about, “Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering⁴ — like one who carries his stake on his shoulder”.⁵ A stake was the instrument of torture and hanging, like the cross. We also read a story about such crucifixions of Jews that goes as follows: “I read that Jose ben Joezer was martyred during the Greek persecutions. His sister’s son, Joachim of Zeroroth, told him how Jose bore his own cross to be crucified.”⁶

Since Jesus knew He was on His way to being executed, He informed His disciples that they too must be willing to die for the cause, just as He was. Such a commitment entailed putting everything else one might desire to do in life aside if it interfered with carrying out the mission given to them by Christ. In this context, the cross is seen as a symbol of commitment. We read in the Old Testament how Esther was given a similar sense of responsibility by her uncle Mordecai, “If you keep quiet now, help and freedom for the Jews will have to come from another place. But you and your father’s family will all die. And who knows, maybe you have been chosen to be the queen for such a time as this.”⁷

In his sermon on this text, Chrysostom has this to say: “When did Jesus teach this? When Peter said, ‘God forbid, Lord! This will never happen to You.’ And when Peter was told, ‘Get behind me, Satan,’ Jesus did not merely rebuke Peter. He was willing to teach him more fully of the benefit of His Passion and about the exceeding confusion in what Peter had said. So He responds in effect: ‘Your word to me is that this will never happen to me, but My word to you is “Not only is this hurtful to you, and destructive, to hinder me and be displeased at my Passion.” But more so it will be impossible for you even to be saved unless you yourself are continually prepared for death.’ So, lest anyone should imagine that His suffering was unworthy of Him, He teaches them what great gain will come from it. This applies not only to His former afflictions but also to those yet to come. Later He will teach in John’s Gospel that ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’⁸ So He now begins discussing more fully the out-workings of the future, not only with respect to His own suffering and death but with theirs as well. Unwillingness to die is grievous, but to be ready for death is good and of great profit. Jesus makes this clear by what follows, but for the present He works it out on one side only. Note that He does not say, ‘You must suffer whether you will it or not.’ Rather, He says, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ This is as if to say: ‘I force no one, I compel no one, but each one I make the master of his own choice. So I say, “if anyone will.”’”⁹

Verse 25: Any of you who try to preserve the way you live your life now will end up wasting it. But you who give up the way you live and live for me will find real living.

In light of what Jesus has already said, this verse has two meanings. One: that they must be willing to forget about ever going back to fishing and whatever else they were doing and pledge themselves to be His apostles for the rest of their lives or they will never know the joy and fulfillment they will experience by being His ambassadors to the world. Or two: they must be willing to count what they have attained in this world as nothing to hold on to and give it up for the cause, then they will be given so much more of a better life serving Him.

No wonder our Lord’s talk about saving one’s life by losing it for His sake has often been debated. According to Rabbi Nathan, he felt that the Jewish Fathers have clearly defined that as foregoing the pleasures of this life in order to give time to study the Torah and grow in the Word. He quotes Rabbi Judah the Prince as saying; “He who accepts the pleasures of this world shall be denied the pleasures of the world to come; but he who does not accept the pleasures of this world will be granted the pleasures of the world to come.”¹⁰ While Jesus many not have been paraphrasing this in His own statement, it is clear that the Jews accepted the same consequence for their faith in God.

Chrysostom gives his understanding of what Jesus says here: “Because Jesus had said, ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,’ Jesus makes a strict distinction between salvation and destruction. This was to prevent anyone from imagining the one destruction and the other salvation to be all the same thing in the last instance. The distance is infinite between destruction and salvation. Then He makes this inference once for all to establish these points: ‘For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?’ Do you see how the wrongful preservation of life amounts to destruction and is worse than all destruction, as being even past remedy from the want of anything more to redeem it?”¹¹

So we can see that there is a fine line between managing one’s life and martyring one’s life. It would not have helped had all of Jesus’s disciples gone into battle and offered themselves up for execution as soon as He ascended into heaven. A worldwide community of believers would have never been realized. But at the same time, since they were chosen to be His followers and had committed themselves to Him for the rest of their lives, then they must now pledge to be willing to suffer whatever consequences may come their way for being one of His disciples. In so doing they simply left it up to God as to when the end would come for their mission.

Verse 26: It is worth nothing if you own the whole world but end up losing the life you could have had. You could never pay enough to buy back your wasted life.

Most scholars believe that Jesus is speaking here of redemption, which was the purchasing of a prisoner or slave from bondage. In fact, the Ethiopic Version renders this: “What can man give for the redemption of his soul.” The Aramaic Version reads: “What will a man give in exchange for his soul.” One of the oldest Hebrew versions of Matthew reads: “What good exchange does the man make if for present things that are spoiled he should give his soul to the judgment of Gehenna?”¹²

These all seem to echo the words of Solomon who said: “What does a person gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?”¹³ Jewish commentators say: “What Solomon meant to convey by these words is that whatever a man may possess on earth–under the sun–he must inevitably part with, but it is different if he provides for himself above the sun, that is. in heaven.”¹⁴ Not only that, but we are all one-of-a-kind, and there are no duplicates, so if we are not all we can be while we are here, who can take our place.

We read this story in Jewish literature: “When Rabbi Simon bar Zebid died, Rabbi Ilya came up and eulogized him by expounding as follows: ‘Four things are essential for the existence of the world. But if they are lost, they can be replaced as we see from the following verse, ‘Surely there is a mine for silver and a place for gold which they refine. Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted from the ore’.¹⁵ If these are lost they can be replaced. But if a disciple of the sages dies, who shall bring us his replacement? Who shall bring us his substitute?’”¹⁶

We find that Satan was so convinced that Job would rather protect himself and his property, that should God allow some misfortune to befall him he would not stand for it. Said the devil, “Skin for skin! A man will give everything he has to protect himself. I swear, if You attack his flesh and bones, he will curse You to Your face!”¹⁷ Of course, we know that Satan was proven wrong. As Job says later: “What hope do people without God have when it is time to die when God takes their life away?”¹⁸ And so our Lord wanted Peter, as well as all His followers, to prove Satan wrong once again. In a song by the Korah family we find this expression, “No one has enough to buy back a life, and you cannot bribe God. You will never get enough money to pay for your own life”.¹⁹

One Jewish writer felt that maybe there may have been a misunderstanding. God did not expect them to pay for their own redemption, but in the end, they all would pay with their lives, upon which they had made no deposit, therefore there would be no return.²⁰ What Jesus was trying to point out was that He was on His way to sacrifice Himself in order to pay for their lives. Therefore, once the purchase is made, their lives would then belong to God for Him to use in any way He desired that would bring Him glory and honor. But acknowledging that purchase and surrendering that life would be up to them. It would be their choice to make. But what was just as important was the fact that Jesus as the Son of man, would return one day for all those who had surrendered and lived their lives for God’s glory.

Church father Origen has this commentary: “We could interpret the saying, however, in another way. If anyone knows what salvation is and wants to save his own life, after bidding farewell to his life, denying himself and taking up his cross and following me, he will, in terms of the world, have lost his life. But, having lost his life for me and my teaching, he will gain in the end this kind of loss, salvation.”²¹

Origen then goes on to say: “But what shall a person give in exchange for his life, would seem, if spoken in answer to a query, to indicate a person who trades his life; a person who, after sin, has given up his substance in order that his property might feed the poor. He would in that way receive salvation. Yet, in a positive light, I think this indicates that there is nothing in a person that he can give in trade for his life that will buy off death. God, however, has ransomed us all with the priceless blood of Jesus so that ‘we are bought with a price,’²² ‘having been purchased not with perishable things like silver and gold but with the priceless blood of the spotless, flawless Lamb,’²³”²⁴

When put together, Jesus was telling His followers that they would be foolish to spend what they are promised in the future to purchase those things they want to enjoy today. In today’s context, we could illustrate it this way: Why take all you have out of your IRA that continues to appreciate in value until the day you need it, in order to buy things for today that only depreciate in value and ends up leaving you nothing at the end to save you from despair.