“Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? ” (Mark 8:34-36)
A paradox is “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a truth.” There is always the element of contradiction in a paradox, something that just doesn’t seem to make sense. The paradox that Jesus teaches His disciples here is “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
Peter found it hard to accept Jesus’s teaching about His impending suffering and death (see Matt 16) and many of us continue to find God’s ways paradoxical and hard to accept. God’s way of working was at odds with the world’s way of working and it still is; Jesus is the stone that makes us stumble:
“The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.He will be a holy place; for both Israel and Judah he will be a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare. Many of them will stumble; they will fall and be broken, they will be snared and captured.” (Is 8:13-15)
We will never truly understand God (who is transcendent); His ways and thoughts are far above ours (Is 55). Nonetheless, Jesus has shown us how to live in the manner of a servant, putting the needs of others before His own.
The Cross is perhaps the place where we see the paradoxical nature of God’s plans most evidently. To the human eye, the Cross was the place of failure and weakness, but in actual fact, Jesus’s ‘secret ambition’ was to ‘give His life away’ (Michael W. Smith, ‘Secret Ambition’); He knew the principle that death precedes life:
“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:24-25)
The Cross, as Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 1, shows us the difference between God and man: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor 1:25)
We need to understand the divine principles of surrender and obedience, that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9), that it doesn’t depend on our human reasoning and understanding but on God’s grace. As we learn to respond to God as Abraham did when asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, we learn to ‘live to lose’ (Aaron Shust) and find that things are not always as they appear to be. We save our lives by losing them; we find life by walking on the narrow road, not on the wide road; we win by losing. The challenge is to surrender and believe.
“Come lose your life for a carpenter’s son
For a madman who died for a dream
Then you’ll have the faith His first followers had
And you’ll feel the weight of the beam
So surrender the hunger to say you must know
Have the courage to say, “I believe”
For the power of paradox opens your eyes
And blinds those who say they can see.
When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
So we follow God’s own Fool
For only the foolish can tell
Believe the unbelievable
Come be a fool as well.”
(‘God’s Own Fool’, Micahel Card)