When Love Looks Like Sacrifice
Take Up Your Cross
Reflection on Matthew 16:24-28
When Jesus tells His disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me," He's not asking us to live a joyless, burdensome life. He's inviting us into the most profound mystery of our faith, that true life comes through love, and love always involves sacrifice. Think about the people you love most deeply. Don't you find yourself naturally putting their needs before your own? When a parent stays up all night with a sick child or when someone forgoes their own dreams to care for an aging parent, they're not being miserable; they're discovering what it means to be truly alive. This is exactly what Jesus talks about when He speaks of denying ourselves.
Let's be honest, there's nothing easy about what Jesus is asking. Taking up our cross means embracing the hardest parts of our faith, the moments when everything in us wants to take the comfortable path. It means choosing humility when we want to be right, choosing forgiveness when we want revenge, choosing generosity when we want to hoard. This is where true humility comes in, not thinking less of ourselves, but thinking of ourselves less. When we deny our immediate desires for comfort, recognition, or control, we're not losing ourselves; we're finding who we really are beneath all the noise of our ego. The cross transforms us because it strips away everything that isn't really us, all the pride, the defensiveness, the need to always come out on top, and reveals the image of God that was there all along.
Here's the stunning paradox: the more we deny ourselves, the more we actually receive. When we stop clutching so tightly to our own plans, our wounded pride, our need to be understood, we create space for God to fill us with something infinitely better. The hard truth is that following Jesus means accepting that we don't always get to be comfortable, we don't always get our way, and we don't always get the credit we think we deserve. But in that very denial, in the genuine humility of saying "not my will but Yours", we discover a breathtaking freedom. It's like finally stopping the exhausting work of trying to be God in our own lives and letting the real God show us what true abundance looks like. The saints knew this secret: they denied themselves everything the world said would make them happy, and in return, they received everything that actually did.
Jesus ends this passage by promising that some standing there would see Him coming in His kingdom before they died. He kept that promise at the Transfiguration, but He keeps it still today in every Mass, in every act of love, in every moment when we choose His way over the world's way. The kingdom of God isn't just a future destination; it's a present reality that breaks into our world whenever someone chooses to live like Jesus lived. When you walk into a room and bring peace instead of conflict, when you offer hope to someone who's discouraged, when you love unconditionally, that's the kingdom of God manifesting through you. This is what the Catholic faith offers: not a set of rules to follow, but an invitation to participate in God's own life, to become channels of His love in a world that desperately needs it. The cross isn't the end of the story; it's the beginning of everything beautiful.
©2025 James Dacey Jr.
