© 2026 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.
In January 2018, Liam Neeson, in anticipation of the debut of his latest film, The Commuter, gave an interview in which he was asked about the pay gap between women and men actors in Hollywood. Earlier that week, USA Today had highlighted the disparity in a story it published about Mark Wahlberg being paid 1,000 times more than his co-start Michele Williams in the film, All the Money in the World. When Neeson was asked about it, he was ready…sort of.
“There’s a lot of healthy and necessary discussion about it because the disparity sometimes is [really] disgraceful,” Neeson said, using a word that was once enough to get a film an R-rating all by itself. When asked what it would take for Hollywood to move past the disparity, Neeson responded, “We’re starting…it’s starting with these extraordinary actresses and brave ladies, and we as men have got to be part of it, you know? We started it, so we have to be part of the solution.”
“So would you take a pay cut to kind of equal things out?” the interviewer asked. “No! Pay cut?” Neeson scoffed. “No, no, no, no, no. That’s gone too far.” The actor seems to have anticipated being celebrated for his bold stand, but the video clip of the interview quickly became a meme for everything that stands in the way of equity. Doing the right thing always sounds like a good idea until we are confronted with what it will cost us.
Last week, we heard Jesus ask his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets,” the disciples replied. Then, Jesus turned the question back onto them: “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Peter’s confession was a moment when God revealed a truth about Godself to the world. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,” Jesus said, “for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter—Petros—and on this Petros I will build my church.” Peter’s confession will become the bedrock upon which Jesus Christ will build his community of followers. But, as we hear today, that community of followers isn’t what Peter and his companions expected it to be.
The authors of the lectionary split Matthew 16 into two separate weeks, which makes it hard for a preacher to convey the extent to which Peter’s confession and Jesus’s prediction are really two sides of the same coin. In the gospel tradition, Peter is the first person to correctly identify Jesus as the messiah—God’s anointed one—and, almost as soon as Peter gets the words out of his mouth, Jesus begins to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Jesus knows that you can’t have one without the other. He can’t be God’s anointed one and not also be the one who will suffer and die for the sake of God’s people. He knows that his suffering and death are the very means by which his identity as God’s messiah will be fulfilled. But holding those two seemingly disparate truths together is more than the disciples can bear.
“God forbid it, Lord!” Peter exclaims in utter shock and disbelief, forgetting himself and rebuking his master. “This must never happen to you.” But Jesus then turns to Peter and rebukes him back: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” I love the way Matthew’s version of this story helps us know that Peter’s instinctive, human desire to protect Jesus from suffering is actually a stumbling block—an impediment—to Jesus’s faithfulness to God’s will.
The thing that’s getting in the way is Peter—his humanity—his instinctive attachment to, immersion in, dependence upon, and preference for the ways of humankind. It’s one thing to confess Jesus as God’s messiah, but it’s quite another to follow where he leads. Jesus has been sent to accomplish God’s will, and his faithfulness to God will bring him into direct conflict with the ways of the world. His allegiance to the reign of God and God’s preference for the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, and the oppressed is the reason the religious and political powers will execute him by nailing him to the cross. But it is not Jesus’s suffering and death that are a threat to God’s ways becoming manifest in the world. It is our unwillingness to accept them that stands in the way.
“If you want to become my follower,” Jesus offers as an alternative, “you must deny yourself and take up your cross and then follow me.” We must deny ourselves. That is the first step to faithfulness, Jesus teaches us. But what does that mean? What is self-denial? At its root, the word means to refuse, reject, disown, or repudiate. When that word occurs in the New Testament, it is usually used of denying someone or something else—most notably in the Last Supper, when Jesus tells Peter that, before the cock crows, he will deny him three times. Only twice is this word used in the reflexive sense—once in 2 Timothy and once here in Matthew 16—and, in both cases, it suggests a fundamental rejection of one’s identity.
But I don’t think Jesus means that we are supposed to lose touch with the person God has made us to be. I think the self-denial he has in mind is less psychical and more physical. In the text, there’s a linguistic link between “deny yourself” and “take up your cross.” Unlike “follow me,” which comes after, the verbs for “deny” and “take up” share the same tense, implying that they must be completed together before any following can begin. Given the way in which Jesus has described the inseparability of his faithfulness to God and his acceptance of suffering, I think he means the same for us—that to deny ourselves is to take up our cross, and that we must do both before we can truly follow him.
I think Jesus expects us to die. I think the self-denial he has in mind looks like a willingness to embrace our own suffering and death for his sake. I think the instinctive desire to avoid hardship at all costs is the very thing that stands in the way of our faithfulness to God. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” That’s not a metaphor for spiritual discomfort or nominal sacrifice. That’s a call to martyrdom. Two thousand years after Jesus said these words, they have lost their sting. None of us expects to die for our faith. This is America, after all. The most that following Jesus has ever cost us is ten percent of our paycheck and an early start to Sunday morning. But, if we are going to proclaim Jesus as God’s messiah and ourselves as his followers, we must be willing to die.
To believe in Jesus and to be his disciple is to give up our allegiance to this world and to seek, through the spiritual disciplines, the dissolution of our attachment—our enslavement—to its ways in order that we might freely follow him unto death. Why would we ever do that? Because Jesus has showed us that it is only by dying to this world that we are reborn to new and everlasting life. “Those who lose their life for my sake,” Jesus promises us, “will find it.”
To close, I want to reflect on the nature of Christian discipleship as a life of suffering that we would gladly choose. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Whether we follow Jesus where he leads is up to us. As John Chrysostom preached 1600 years ago, “See how [Jesus] also makes His discourse unexceptionable: not saying at all, “Whether you will or not, you must suffer this,” but how? “If [anyone] will come after me. I force not, I compel not, but each one I make lord of his own choice…For to good things do I call you, not to things evil or burdensome; not to punishment and vengeance, that I should have to compel [you]. Nay, the nature of the thing is alone sufficient to attract you” (Sermons on Matthew, 55.1).
By suffering and dying for our sake, Jesus has made us the lords of our own choice. He has presented us with the offer of everlasting life, and we must choose whether we will accept it even though it means that we must die with him. To accept the way of Jesus is to accept the way of the cross, and accepting the way of the cross requires that we learn how to deny ourselves. But we cannot learn the spiritual way of self-denial all at once. It takes practice. Thankfully, we have a good teacher. Jesus has taught us how to pray. He has taught us how to love each other. He has taught us how, when two or three are gathered in his name, he will be present in the midst of them.
Prayer, worship, service, community—the fundamental spiritual practices of our faith are designed to show us what Jesus has done for us—the abundant life that he has given to us. Those practices teach us how to say yes when Jesus invites us to follow him and to do so not out of compulsion but out of joy. When those practices teach us that our greatest hope is found not in our attachment to this world but in our being set free from it, our eager reply to Jesus will be yes because following him will cost us everything in this life but it also promises us everything in the life to come.
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