Discipleship and the Cross

At a glance

The chapter heading text (KJV)

“And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things… And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.”

Mark 8:31–38 KJV

Summary

Bonhoeffer notices that Mark places the prediction of the Messiah's suffering and the call to discipleship in the very same scene, and argues this is not incidental. Suffering, rejection and death are not an unfortunate detour on Jesus' way to glory that Peter is right to want removed — they are what the Scriptures require the Messiah to undergo, and so they become, necessarily, what following him requires too. A gospel that keeps the benefits of Christ while quietly removing the cross from both his story and the disciple's is not a milder version of Christianity; for Bonhoeffer it has stopped being recognisably Christian at all.

He is careful to distinguish the disciple's cross from ordinary suffering. Illness, bereavement and hardship are the common lot of all people, Christian or not, and Bonhoeffer refuses to sentimentalise them into something they are not. The specific cross of discipleship is the suffering that comes precisely from clinging to Jesus Christ, from refusing to give him up when doing so would relieve the pressure — the suffering, in short, that only a follower of Jesus, as such, is exposed to.

Self-denial, in this account, is not asceticism for its own sake, self-hatred, or a general spiritual discipline of the will. It is simply the negative side of knowing Christ: a disciple no longer looks first to protect the self, because attention has shifted entirely onto Christ and onto the road he is walking. This, Bonhoeffer says, is exactly why the yoke is light even though it is a cross — the disciple no longer carries the exhausting burden of self-justification and self-protection.

The chapter's closing move is the one for which Bonhoeffer is best remembered: to lose one's life for Christ's sake is in fact to find it, because the self that clings to its own security was never really alive in the fullest sense to begin with. Death and life, cross and resurrection, are bound together in exactly the way costly grace was in chapter one — not sequentially, as a painful price paid before a reward arrives, but as two sides of a single reality that cannot be pulled apart without destroying both.

Key points

• Jesus links his own predicted suffering and the call to discipleship in a single scene — the cross is not an accident that discipleship can be preached without.
• Peter's rebuke is entirely understandable, but Jesus' sharp answer treats ‘protecting Christ (and oneself) from suffering’ as a fundamentally human, not divine, way of thinking.
• The disciple's cross is not ordinary suffering common to all people; it is specifically the suffering that comes from clinging to Christ rather than letting him go.
• Self-denial is not self-hatred or asceticism for its own sake — it is simply what happens when attention shifts off the self and onto Christ.
• To lose one's life for Christ's sake is to find it: cross and resurrection, like costly grace, belong together rather than in sequence.

Related Scripture

• Matthew 16:24–26
• Luke 9:23–24
• Philippians 3:10
• 2 Corinthians 4:10–11

For reflection and discussion

1. Where have you seen — in yourself or in wider church life — an attempt to keep the comforts of the gospel while quietly setting aside the cost?
2. Bonhoeffer distinguishes ordinary human suffering from the specific suffering of discipleship. Can you identify anything in your life that belongs to the second category rather than the first?
3. What would it look like, concretely, to ‘stop protecting yourself’ in one particular area where you currently do so instinctively?