Take Up Your Cross: Just prior to our Gospel reading today, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they offer the various responses that they have heard from others. “But who do YOU say that I am?” asks Jesus. “Who are you following?” Today, Jesus once again teaches those around him who he is, therefore, what is ahead for the Son of God and what that means for the followers of Jesus. 

What have you started giving up or taking on for Lent?

We can understand Peter’s mix-up because his mental model was likely the same one that every other Jewish person had after generations of waiting for the Messiah. In Jesus’s eyes, it becomes a teachable moment. 

Our Lenten journey is about realizing how God works and turning to Jesus on his journey to the cross in order to learn: being a follower of Jesus means letting go of our own ideas and doing the life of faith Jesus’s way; lose in order to gain and realizing that gaining doesn’t always mean winning.

Jesus uses the image of the cross, something everyone listening could immediately imagine. It ought to shape our understanding of what it means to suffer and how we define what our “crosses” are as Christians. It is to be like Jesus Christ was, and therefore to live differently.

Prayer: O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.