"If any of you would come after me..."
“If any would follow me…
Mark 8:34-37
July 27, 2025
In the past two weeks, we have been looking at how far Jesus would go to help someone else. We watched as he ran into the bent over woman on the Sabbath and felt her pain. How far would Jesus go to help her? He was willing to break the sabbath laws with the sabbath “police” standing there and watching him. It was more important to relieve the woman’s pain than it was to appease the authorities. I basically tried to ask you, “Does your understanding of Jesus include the notion that Jesus was a rule breaker?”
Last week, we watched as Jesus healed the blind man at Bethsaida. In this case, he wasn’t breaking rules. Unlike with the bent over woman where the community seemed to ignore her, here there is a caring community who cared enough to bring this man to Jesus. I suggested that this might be the most frequent “healing” that we are a part of—helping someone else get to the person who can actually help them. Jesus takes the blind man away from the village and heals him, but it is a messy, confusing business that takes multiple attempts. Does your understanding of Jesus include a sense of how relentless he can be?
This morning, we are not looking at what Jesus did for another suffering person. Instead, we are encountering Jesus as he looks his disciples and a crowd of potential followers in the eye and tells them very honestly about the cost of discipleship. When Jesus saw suffering people, he relieved their suffering. However, when Jesus called people to follow him, he basically said, “Get ready to suffer.” Let that sink in… He doesn’t say that if you follow him then . everything will be smooth and easy. He doesn’t say that if you follow him then nothing bad will happen to you or those you love. He doesn’t say that if you follow him then God will fulfill your every hope and dream. Instead, he says, “This is going to be hard.”
If you are following Christ, then things get hard—not on some day in the future, not on the worst day imaginable, but immediately. This is true not because every day is a bad day but because every day is a challenge. First of all, Jesus says, if you’re going to follow me, then you actually have to follow me. You’re not in the driver’s seat. You’re not the leader. You’re not in charge. “Keep your eye on me and keep up!”
When the Hindmans are on a trip, usually I drive. (Tracy doesn’t like to drive.) This means that Tracy is navigating. This role goes all the way back to the days of paper maps. You remember those right? They would be folded correctly once and only once—when you bought them. After that—kind of like a fitted sheet—they would never be folded correctly again. Nowadays, though, we have our G.P.S. systems. Satellites guide us through the world or “to the Target nearest me.” That’s crazy if you think about it…
The truth is that it’s not always easy to follow a G.P.S. You have to trust it (and who hasn’t argued with a G.P.S.?). You have to get comfortable with how it gives directions. (How far ahead of a turn does it notify you? For that matter, how far really is 500 feet?). If you feel like messing with the driver, you can change the voice of the G.P.S. to whatever you want. (My favorite is “Mr. T.—“I said turn left, fool!”)
Of course, all of these things are annoying, the kind of things that allow us to pass the trip arguing with the G.P.S. However, underneath those arguments is our real “beef:” we simply don’t like it when anyone else tells us what to do. In fact, we dislike this so much that occasionally we will make an intentional mistake, just to hear that passive aggressive computer voice say, “Reconfiguring route…
Tracy’s special wrinkle when she is in the car is to run several G.P.S. systems at the same time (I know! She’s also been known to pull up multiple weather aps, too!). So, as if it wasn’t enough to have someone tell me what to do, now I have multiple voices and sometimes conflicting advice. (“Turn left.” “That’s not what I’d do!”)
If we’re going to follow Jesus, then we have to actually follow Jesus. What that sets up for us is an internal life that sounds a lot like the car running multiple G.P.S. systems at the same time. If we are following Jesus then there is going to be internal conflict. Why? It’s pretty simple: the “built-in, default, internal G.P.S. that is inside of us all is for us to follow our own desires: “here’s what I want and here’s how I’m going to get it;” “here’s what feels good that I’m going to seek and here’s what feel bad that I’m going to avoid;” “here’s me, doing whatever I darn well please and here’s me rejecting anyone who gets in my way.”
That’s the crazy thing. If we are following Jesus or at least intending to follow Jesus, then Jesus just constantly gets in the way. Jesus keeps steering us away from what we want. Jesus keeps steering us in the direction of things we would rather avoid. Jesus keeps looking us in the eye and saying, “You remember, this life isn’t all about you, right?
In our text, Jesus says, super directly, “If any would follow me, you must deny yourself…” Think of all the people who have ever told you that they take the Bible literally, that every word of it is God’s word and God’s literal truth. Now, ask yourself, did they seem like they were taking these words—you must deny yourself—literally? Maybe some of them do. I keep thinking though of the lavish lifestyles of some of the big-steeple preachers who lead those folks. It seems like a lot of the time, they are asking their followers to deny themselves so that the preachers can get whatever they want? It’s like a pyramid scheme: you deny yourself today so that I get what I want today and then tomorrow—if it ever comes—you’ll get everything you want, too. Self-centeredness, even when it’s gussied up to look and sound like faith, is still self-centeredness.
The kicker, of course is that we not only are called to deny ourselves and follow Jesus but we are told to “take up our cross” while we are doing it. Here we are, rolling along in life, with all sorts of G.P.S. systems going at the same time. “If you want to do what feels good, turn right. If you want peace in your home, turn left. If you want the next moment to be easy, just go with the flow.” However, if you really messed up and you’ve got Jesus running in the background and you’re hoping to actually follow him, you are going to be constantly re-routed. “Go straight to that homeless person on the corner. Treat them as a human being.” “Call the friend that I’ve got on your “radar screen. There’s a reason I’ve got you thinking about them. They need your help.” Or, “Keep going this way. I know it’s hard and lonely but we’re in this together…
The cross is the ultimate symbol of suffering. When you really think about it, it’s really odd that so many people wear them around their necks, right? If it’s just about the object, we could just as easily wear a noose or an electric chair, right? It’s not just about the object though. What the cross is meant to remind us of—at its best—is that suffering, even unjust, unfair suffering, is very real…but…suffering can be meaningful. There are things worth suffering for. With God’s help, we can endure and redeem that suffering. In fact, our willingness to deny ourselves and suffer through what is worth suffering for can be our ultimate statement of what matters in this life.
Here’s the assumption of the text and the heart of the New Testament. Life is not some useless exercise. Life is not a death sentence, waiting to be executed. Life is not meaningless. The fact is that life is a gift. You have been given the chance to live, the chance to decide how to live, and the chance to decide what you will live for. You won’t live forever. If you want, you can spend your life acting as if you will or you can live as if your live won’t really start at all until you say it starts, until you have the degree or the family or the cash on hand to say, “Now, we’re really living!”
To put the matter differently, it is entirely possible to be given the most incredible gift that any of us could ever receive—you get to be alive—and still choose to live ungratefully. You can live as if the world owes you something. You can live as if it is other people’s job to meet your every need. You can choose to be indifferent to the needs of others and decide that your best day is the day when no one bothers you. Or, you can recognize that being alive is a pretty incredible gift and maybe even realize that I should probably do something good with the life that I’ve been given as a kind of thank you note to whoever gave me this gift in the first place.
Of course, it is possible to realize what a gift life is and still choose to live selfishly. If I only have so many days to live, then I’m going to maximize my pleasure. I’m going to do only what I want to do. I’m going to make sure that the central question in any moment is going to be, “What’s in this moment for me?” This is the way of the world, right? Tit for tat. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. All the selfish people, taking advantage of one another, to get what they want most.
That’s where Jesus comes back in. Jesus poses a question: what if you succeeded in this life and got everything you ever wanted but in the process, you lost your soul, your self, your life. Even if you’re only doing what everyone else is doing, even if your living in a selfish world and, in fact, you are winning that game, even if you get a lot of praise from envious people about the cool stuff you have accumulated, what if the stuff is just stuff and the praise is empty and late at night you know that the emptiest thing around is the space inside your chest that used to contain a beating heart? What if, one day, you realize that you’ve wasted the life you were given?
Jesus invites us to live a life that has real meaning and purpose. That meaning and purpose rests not in the latest fleeting pleasure but on a firm foundation. Jesus leads. We follow. Jesus invites us to care about more than just ourselves, making our burning question be not what’s in it for me but how can I help. Jesus reminds us that the only way to really live is to devote our lives to concrete acts of care. Our life will matter when we live as if if the needs of others matter more.