Self-denial
Self-denial
First, the call to self-denial. The invitation of Jesus is plain: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mark 8:34). Jesus has just for the first time clearly predicted his sufferings and death. It ‘must’ happen to him, he says (v. 31). But now he expresses implicitly a ‘must’ for his followers as well. He must go to the cross; they must take up their cross and follow him. Indeed, they must do it ‘daily’. And, as the negative counterpart, if anybody does not take his cross and follow him, he is not worthy of him and cannot be his disciple.5 In this way, one might say, every Christian is both a Simon of Cyrene and a Barabbas. Like Barabbas we escape the cross, for Christ died in our place. Like Simon of Cyrene we carry the cross, for he calls us to take it up and follow him (Mark 15:21).
The Romans had made crucifixion a common sight in all their colonized provinces, and Palestine was no exception. Every rebel condemned to crucifixion was compelled to carry his cross, or at least the patibulum (the cross beam), to the scene of his execution. Plutarch wrote that ‘every criminal condemned to death bears his cross on his back’.6 So John wrote of Jesus that ‘carrying his own cross, he went out to The Place of the Skull’ (19:17). To take up our cross, therefore, and follow Jesus, is ‘to put oneself into the position of a condemned man on his way to execution’.7 For if we are following Jesus with a cross on our shoulder, there is only one place to which we are going: the place of crucifixion. As Bonhoeffer put it, ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die’.8 Our ‘cross’, then, is not an irritable husband or a cantankerous wife. It is instead the symbol of death to the self.
Although Jesus may have had the possibility of martyrdom in his mind, the universal nature of his call (‘if anyone...’) suggests a broader application. It is surely self-denial which, by this vivid imagery, Jesus is describing. To deny ourselves is to behave towards ourselves as Peter did towards Jesus when he denied him three times. The verb is the same (aparneomai). He disowned him, repudiated him, turned his back on him. Self-denial is not denying to ourselves luxuries such as chocolates, cakes, cigarettes and cocktails (though it may include this); it is actually denying or disowning ourselves, renouncing our supposed right to go our own way. ‘To deny oneself is...to turn away from the idolatry of self-centredness.’9 Paul must have been referring to the same thing when he wrote that those who belong to Christ ‘have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires’ (Gal. 5:24). No picture could be more graphic than that: an actual taking of hammer and nails to fasten our slippery fallen nature to the cross and thus do it to death. The traditional word for this is ‘mortification’; it is the sustained determination by the power of the Holy Spirit to ‘put to death the misdeeds of the body’, so that through this death we may live in fellowship with God.10
In fact, Paul writes in his letters of three different deaths and resurrections, which are part and parcel of our Christian experience. Much confusion arises when we fail to distinguish between them. The first (which we have already considered) is the death to sin and subsequent life to God, which happens to all Christians by virtue of our union with Christ in his death and resurrection. By it we share in the benefits both of Christ’s death (its forgiveness) and of his resurrection (its power). This is inherent in our conversion/baptism.
The second is the death to self, called variously taking up the cross, or denying, crucifying or mortifying ourselves. As a result, we live a life of fellowship with God. This death is not something which has happened to us, and which we are now told to ‘reckon’ or remember, but something which we must deliberately do ourselves, though by the power of the Spirit, putting our old nature to death. Indeed all Christians have done it, in the sense that it is an essential aspect of our original and continuing repentance, and we cannot be Christ’s disciples without it. But we have to maintain this attitude, that is, take up the cross daily.
The third kind of death and resurrection I mentioned in chapter 9. It is the carrying about in our bodies of the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our bodies (2 Cor. 4:9–10). Plainly the arena for this is our bodies. It refers to their infirmity, persecution and mortality. It is in this connection that Paul could say both ‘I die daily’ (1 Cor. 15:30–31) and ‘we face death all day long’ (Rom. 8:36). For it is a continuous physical frailty. But then the ‘resurrection’, the inward vitality or renewal from the life of Jesus within us, is continuous too (2 Cor. 4:16).
To sum up, the first death is legal; it is a death to sin by union with Christ in his death to sin (bearing its penalty), and the resultant resurrection with him leads to the new life of freedom which justified sinners enjoy. The second death is moral; it is a death to self as we put to death the old nature and its evil desires, and the resurrection which follows leads to a new life of righteousness in fellowship with God. The third death is physical; it is a death to safety, a ‘being given over to death for Jesus’ sake’, and the corresponding resurrection is Jesus’ strength which he makes perfect in our weakness. The legal death was a ‘death unto sin once and for all’, but the moral and physical deaths are daily – even continuous – experiences for the Christian disciple.
I wonder how my readers have reacted thus far, especially to the emphasis on dying to self, or rather putting it to death by crucifying or mortifying it? I expect (and hope) that you have felt uneasy about it. I have expressed an attitude to the self so negative that I must almost seem to have aligned myself with the bureaucrats and technocrats, the ethologists and behaviourists, in demeaning human beings. It is not that what I have written is untrue (for it was Jesus who told us to take up our cross and follow him to death), but that it is only one side of the truth. It implies that our self is wholly bad, and that it must on that account be totally repudiated, indeed ‘crucified’.