Gospel Reading for the 24th Sunday Ordinary Time 

Jesus and his group are on their way to Jerusalem. They wind through Caesarea Philippi. This is the setting for Jesus’ identity and spiritual practice to become plain and direct. Jesus asks his disciples who the people think he is. The disciples report back various answers. Some think he is a prophet; others say he is John the Baptist back from the dead. Jesus presses them: who do you say I am? Peter gets it: Jesus, he says, is the Messiah. But he fails to understand what this really means. Peter needs to listen to the Spirit more.

Then, Jesus deepens this understanding of himself as the Messiah by predicting his passion, death, and resurrection. The disciples do not get what Jesus is talking about at all. Peter clearly does not understand. He does not see how the Messiah is fully revealed on the cross. He hears Jesus. He gets the danger of heading to Jerusalem. But he is not listening to God. He is trapped in his thinking and in the prison of an egocentric mindset. He is thinking only of protecting Jesus out of egocentric attachment, without attention to what God wants. This egocentric thinking will appear more along their journey to Jerusalem.

So, Peter takes him aside and tells him not to go to Jerusalem. Jesus replies severely, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (Mk 8:33). Peter thinks he knows better. We think we know better. This shows how ego takes pride of place in our experience. Ego is the center of our lives, and Jesus recognizes this.

Then, Jesus clarifies that following him means embracing the cross: “deny yourself, take up your cross…lose your life.” This is the central teaching on discipleship in the Gospel of Mark. It is the mother of all Christian practice for it is based on the cross of Christ. Jesus goes to Jerusalem to take up his cross. He denies himself in faithfully carrying out God’s will, which he discerns in prayer: “Abba…not what I will but what you will” (Mk 14:36). Self-denial only makes sense in reference to God. One denies self to be occupied with God.

The mystics interpret this fundamental teaching with words like letting go, detachment, spiritual poverty, and surrender. For Jesus and the mystics, the cross means losing oneself in God and surrendering the ego. The cross is the practice of transcending the self to know God. St. John of the Cross discusses the necessity of denying ego desires to go to God in pure faith, absent of thought. He sees self-denial and pure faith as “a dispossession and annihilation.” We deny our selfish desires and walk the way of pure faith for God alone: “This is a venture in which God alone is sought and gained; thus only God ought to be sought and gained.”

St. John of the Cross notes the fundamental aspects of detachment: letting go of the self to focus on God. Meister Eckhart notes these aspects as well. He preaches, “Now God wants no more from you than that you should in creaturely fashion go out of yourself, and let God be God in you.” One lets go of the self to let God be the center of life.

And this detachment is how we imitate Jesus crucified. Obscure medieval hermit Stephen of Muret makes the connection clear: “If it is the Son of God you wish to imitate – he who emptied himself – you will have to reduce yourself to nothing.” Eckhart concurs. He announces, “The single action of the spiritual path is to reduce self to nothingness.” Here, “reduce yourself to nothing” does not mean belittling yourself. It means losing the self to be lost in God.

On the cross, Jesus lost everything; he lost himself in God. We have to do the same. Losing self means we become God-consumed, God-intoxicated, and God-possessed. Letting go is discovering our already given oneness with the Great Beyond. St. Catherine of Genoa, reflecting on her prayer life, utters, “I am silently lost in God.” St. Paul of the Cross testifies, “Lose yourself in God.” Letting go is the most important basic Gospel practice: losing self to be lost in God.