The Hard Sayings: Matthew 16:24-25

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 will find it.

This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand from a list put together by Lord's Library. To see their list of these verses, go to this page.

These two verses were spoken to the apostles before Jesus led them up to Jerusalem. Jesus has just told them the he must suffer many things there.

Theyare connected by the word meaning “self.” Such connections are important for understanding Jesus’s meaning. Lost words connect both of these verses to each other and what came before. Jesus uses the repetition of words and phrases to emphasize his key points. The punchline here means a “true self".

Pulling Up Stakes

Below is a modern Biblical translation of Matthew 16:24:

NIV: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

The words in boldface are those that need explanation.

The first verb is “wants.” It indicates as desire to do something. It comes from the same root as the word for a person’s “will.” The only way someone can follow Jesus is by wanting to do so.

Both this verse here and the previous verse  use the same Greek phrase. The Greek is opiso mou is translated as "behind me" in the earlier phrase, "Get behind me, Satan." In the NIV version of this verse, this opiso mou isn’t translated but paraphrased as “be my disciple.” The KJV translates it as “come after me.” In the previous verse, "get behind me" seems like a rebuke, but this phrase is a request for support. The Greek is like English when we ask people to support us by asking them to "get behind us."

The next verb, “deny" comes from a Greek word that means "to reject" and "to deny utterly." What makes it interesting is its form. It is a command. In English, commands are all in the second-person, “you.” In Greek, we also have third-party commands where even objects can be commanded. We indicate they are commands by adding a “must” before it.

The word translated as “themselves” seems relatively unimportant, but it connects this verse to the key idea of “self.” “Themselves” is from a reflexive pronoun. But the verb, “deny,” emphasizes it by using a form that indicates that the action is performed by the subject “on themselves.” (See this article). This emphasis on “themselves” connects this verse to the next one, but again the connection is lost in translation.

Jesus completed this first verse by saying that we support him by what is translated as “taking up the cross.” While this is very meaningful to today’s Christians, it would have been meaningless to the apostles at the time. To us, a “cross” is an unusual object, used primarily as a symbol of Christ’s death. However, hearing this verse that way was only possible after Christ's passion, when he was forced to carry his “cross.”

But the Greek word translated as “cross” is not an uncommon object of torture and death. It means a "stake" or "post." The kind of stake in every fence, and the kind of post in every building. Criminals were not hung on the refined crosses depicted today, but nailed to simple upright posts. Romans put the post in the ground so the dying man was high enough to be seen by everyone. But the word “stake” or “post” didn’t only refer to these large posts but to any upright piece of wood standing on the ground. This word only came to mean “cross” hundreds of years later. The Greek word was first translated into the common Latin word for “stake.”

The phrase “take up your cross” would have been heard in that era as "pull up your stake." The phrase had the same metaphoric meaning as it does now: pull up what holds you in place. Stakes marked boundaries and held up tents. Nomadic tents used a number of small posts (see the picture above). These small postswere also used by the nomads as walking sticks.

If anyone wants to come after me, he must reject himself and pull up that stake of his and follow me.

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Losing the Self

Below is a modern Biblical translation of the next verse, Matthew 16:25:

NIV: For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

Note that this verse too is about what someone wants to do, the choice they make. This verse looks like it is about physical life and death, but it isn’t. The “life” here is not the Greek word that Jesus uses to refer to the physical life of our bodies. The Greek word translated as "life" in this verse is translated as "soul" in the following one. The word is the source of our word psyche, and it is most commonly translated as "soul". It is explained in detail in this article. 

The word means "self" in the sense of “ego.” It connects this verse to the “themselves,” the reflexive pronoun, in the verse above.  Jesus often uses psyche to refer to our positions in society (see this article and this one).

The key opposites here are "save" and "lose". In Greek, these words have the sense of "rescue" and "kill." If we use the common translation of psyche as “soul,” this verse talks about saving or rescuing the soul, which works, and losing and killing the soul, which doesn’t work as well. This is why the translators render this word as “life,” but both “soul” and “life” are misleading.

What Jesus is talking about here is the “self,” that is, our “egos,” our thinking of our true selves as our position in this society. Those who try to rescue this self-centeredness will destroy themselves. Those who are willing to sacrifice it, will find their true selves. The word translated as “it” at the end is the common third-person pronoun (“he,” “she,” and “it”) but the word also means “a true self.” It is the verse’s punchline.

What the apostles heard:

Because someone when he wants to rescue this self of his, he will destroy it. Someone, however,  when he destroys thatself of his on account of me will discover a true self.

This brings us back to the first verse. Denying ourselves is choosing to walk away from our positions in human society and following Jesus. Jesus left his earthly role as a carpenter and undertook a new role as teacher. The apostles all did the same. They all walked away from their old selves and created truer ones, who they really were, in the service of the Divine.