Sunday after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross;The Holy Apostle Codratus of Magnesia. Leave-taking of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.
Galatians 2:16-20; Mark 8:34-9:1.
Read Mark 8:34-9:1
Humans are passionately directional. We possess a deep capacity for intense direction and striving. But we can sometimes seem paradoxical. We can find ourselves pulled in conflicting directions, creating internal and external conflict.
But a person cannot really go in two directions at once. There is an old Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs throws a baseball all the way around the world to help Christopher Columbus prove that the world is round. When the ball lands in his catcher’s mitt, it has tourist stickers from cities all around the world. All those stickers must go in the same direction because they are all attached to the same ball. We are that ball – like the stickers, we have various aspects to our personalities, but we only have one human will adding up to them all going in the same direction. When we find ourselves doing things that conflict with our stated goals, it helps to get curious about what real hidden goal, unadmitted to even ourselves, we may be pursuing.
All goals begin with what we really want. Being to various degrees unaware and self-deceiving, our Lord gives us tools with which to engage in an ongoing examination of our depths. If what we desire is to “come after” Jesus, that will manifest itself in a willingness to grapple with self-denial as we follow him in our lives. We will notice a capacity to choose material and reputational loss for spiritual gain by identifying ourselves with Jesus. When we find ourselves not doing what we profess to want, that gives us the opportunity to realign ourselves with Jesus, if that is what we want. So that we may navigate through our internal and external hazards, that question of what we want is the question our Lord ever puts before us