Reclaiming Ought (A Matthew 16 Sermon)
Introduction
Matthew 16:21-28; Ephesians 2:8-9
A few times a month I talk with a longtime friend who pastors back home in Mississippi. This week he told me about communion. Before the service, an officer of his church came to him and said, "I'm going through some things. I don't feel like I should take communion." My friend and I talked about how some folks, because of how they were taught, carry shame to the table instead of hunger. But the point of communion is that Christ opens a seat for us, welcomes us, feeds us grace. It was for that deacon, we agreed, that Christ lived and died. We hoped he'd get the message eventually.
I don't know if you've ever felt that way.
There's a conversation running through the whole New Testament, through the early church, the Middle Ages, the Reformation. It's still running underneath American Christianity today, shaping how our churches think without most of us realizing it. The conversation is also in each of our passages and is addressed by Jesus in the gospel.
The long-running conversation involves three questions.
If we're saved by grace, why does Jesus say the Son of Man is coming to repay everyone for what they've done? Doesn't grace mean the ledger's closed?
If all things are possible for the one who believes, does that mean my suffering is a sign I don't believe enough, rather than the actual shape discipleship takes?
And if grace already saved me, do I actually have to do anything? Jesus says take up your cross. What if I don't?
People have answered these questions differently for two thousand years. By the end of this sermon, you may recognize your own upbringing in how you instinctively answer them.
Go deeper
For a fuller verse-by-verse look at this passage, including original language help behind key words and the theological themes only touched on here, see my commentary on Matthew 16:21-28.
Three Strands in American Christianity
Those three questions have led to three answers and have shaped American Christianity. This doesn’t explain all things, but as a general sketch, I think it is fair. These answers, these tendencies are not three tidy boxes. Most of us carry pieces of more than one. Each answer reaches for something true. Each also worships something false.
Strand one is the treadmill. Picture it: we're drowning in the flood of sin and judgment. Grace gets you into the boat. Your effort keeps you in it. This strand takes sin seriously, takes God's holiness seriously, refuses to pretend how we live doesn't matter. That instinct is right, scripture never treats sin as trivial, and neither should we. But watch what happens to grace here. It stops being a gift and becomes an entry fee you keep paying, month after month, sermon after sermon. Salvation turns into behavior modification, and behavior modification breeds anxiety. Am I doing enough? Have I read my Bible enough, been kind enough, believed hard enough? There's no rest in this, only the relentless pursuit of a perfection you can never confirm you've reached. You can be baptized, confirmed, sitting in the pew every single Sunday, and still lie awake wondering if it's enough. Underneath it is an idolatry of self-will, the belief that your effort, not Christ, is what finally secures you. I grew up under this weight. I know its logic from the inside, and some of you do too.
Strand two is the allergic reaction to strand one. This is likely your tradition, and mine. We saw what strand one's fear does to people, real people, people we loved, and we ran, hard, toward grace. If you came up in a rigid Protestant or Catholic enviroment exhausted by guilt, that run made sense. It wasn't laziness. It was survival. And there's real good in what we found on the other side. This strand freed people from shame. It insists God's love isn't a performance review. It set a wider table, made room for people strand one pushes out the door. But somewhere in our sprint away from strand one, we let go of ought almost entirely. We got so allergic to anything sounding like a demand that we stopped believing Jesus makes real claims on how we live. Grace became the whole conversation, and discipleship, actual cost, actual change, slipped out the side door while we weren't looking. Underneath is an idolatry of comfort. Living a life spent avoiding commitment that cost something is not the same thing as a life touched by grace. Comfort and grace are not the same word.
Strand three is the vending machine. This strand takes God's power seriously. It refuses to shrug at sickness or poverty as though that's just how things are, and there's something admirable in that refusal, a real hope that God still heals, still acts. But read the fine print. The healing, the breakthrough, the comfortable life, it's yours, if, big if, you believe enough. If you're a clean enough vessel. That if is a harder law than Moses ever gave. Moses's law was external, knowable, you could point and say, I did it. "Believe enough" is a standard no one can ever verify they've met, and when the healing or abundance doesn't come, this strand has a cruel habit of blaming the sick person for their own sickness, or the poor person for their poverty. Underneath it is an idolatry of control, the belief that enough faith should let you manage your own destiny.
This strand is not so much a reaction to strand one, the moralistic striving legalism strand, as much as it is the same strand but in a different color and texture. Strand one is about moral performance. This third strand is about faith performance. It measurers you in the sincerity or purity of your belief.
I once had a congregant raised in a strand one, strand three church. They were heavy on behavior and belief, it's on you either way. Troubling symptoms, a hospital admission, and a diagnosis: dangerous, incurable, manageable. Their clergy person walked into that hospital room, sat down, and asked, "Now tell me, what did you do wrong to end up like this?"
At least one of these strands is your go-to, your spiritual reflex.
Three strands, one conversation
How American Christianity tends to answer the questions this passage raises
The treadmill
Moralistic performance
Grace gets you in the boat, but your effort keeps you in it. Sin and holiness are taken seriously, but grace slowly turns into an entry fee you keep paying.
Underlying idolatry
Self-will — trusting your own effort, not Christ, to secure you.
The allergic reaction
Grace without cost
A hard run away from the treadmill's guilt, this strand insists God's love isn't a performance review, but in the sprint away from strand one, ought quietly disappears too.
Underlying idolatry
Comfort — mistaking avoidance of cost for a life touched by grace.
The vending machine
Faith as formula
God's power is taken seriously, and healing or breakthrough is expected, but only if your faith is strong enough or pure enough. When it doesn't come, the sufferer gets blamed.
Underlying idolatry
Control — believing enough faith should let you manage your own destiny.
Cross Versus Glory
Watch where we are in the text. One verse earlier, Peter makes his great confession. "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Jesus calls him the rock. This is Peter's high point.
Then Jesus tells them what kind of Messiah he actually is. He must go to Jerusalem, must suffer, will be killed. Peter can't stomach it. "God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen to you." He wants exactly what strand three wants, glory without the cross first. And Jesus turns on him with the hardest words he speaks to any disciple: "Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
The steady, sturdy rock becomes the stumbling block in a short amount of time.
"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
We call a bad knee or a rough boss "our cross to bear." And sometimes we use it sarcastically, “Oh, my charming personality? That’s just my cross to bear.”
Obviously, that's not what Jesus means. This cross isn't random hardship. It's the chosen cost of following him toward something that will actually cost you something.
And right here, in a few sentences, Jesus corrects all three strands at once.
To strand one, the treadmill of performance, he doesn't add another requirement. He doesn’t say try harder, do more, pray more. Instead, Jesus walks to his real cross in Jerusalem and absorbs the very thing strand one is afraid of: judgment. That why that part of that belief system is a form of idolatry, because the moralistic performance replaces Jesus. It puts your assurance on you, not God.
To strand three, the vending machine, Peter's own instinct, he gives the flattest answer possible: no. Not "believe harder and this won't happen." The cross is the road, not a detour a stronger faith avoids.
And to strand two, the allergy, he's just as direct. Take up your cross isn't a suggestion for the especially devoted. It's what he says to anyone who wants to follow him at all.
The Hinge: A Demanding Grace
So which strand does this passage side with? Because that last line, the Son of Man repaying everyone for what's been done, sounds close to strand one. Sounds like the boat. Like a ledger you'd better keep current.
I don't think it is, but the difference matters.
In strand one, obedience is a precondition, anxious, forward looking, trying to secure something not yet settled. Have I done enough? The judgment hangs over you like a verdict you're still trying to earn your way out of.
But somewhere along the way, someone named another way to understand the ought. Not a ladder toward God. Not only a mirror showing your failure.
It is not a rule book to prove our worth. It is a guidebook for our walk. Yes, grace demands something of us, and grace provides the interest to do the effort. And living in that grace, trying and failing, and then experiencing grace again, produces in us gratitude. Gratitude for the guidebook of the law, gratitude for the grace to try and try again. The motive and the motor for obeying the commands of Jesus change. Our motive is not to escape judgment and the motor is not our anxiety, instead our motive and our motor is gratitude for grace.
Here's what's strange about it. Demanding grace isn't the squishy, therapeutic-only faith our culture and churches, has settled for. Therapeutic-only Christianity has no floor. It can affirm you, but it can't ask anything of you, and if nothing's required of you, nothing you do is that significant either. People sense that hollowness even when they can't name it. A demanding grace says the opposite: you matter enough that God would ask something real of you, and you're secure enough that the asking isn't a threat. Fully held and genuinely called, at the same time.
That’s Paul’s point in Ephesians, chapter 2. ”For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the results of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before to be our way of life.” Using Paul’s term “saved.” You are saved from any idea of condemnation. You are SAVED FOR good work. And when you do good works, take up the cross, you are fulfilling your destiny.
Forgiven and called forward.
That's rare. And it's something to actually stand on and something to build a life from.
That combination is already alive in this room. The volunteer who is likely busy enough with work or in retirement, and yet makes time to pitch in, not just here at the church, but in the community. The one planning Sunday school curriculum on a Saturday night. The one who shows up for the committee meeting they'd rather skip because life doesn’t hit a pause button when you do ministry. It shows up in prioritizing Sunday worship, over other events, activities, and errands. That’s a small sampling of the outcome of a demanding grace: unglamorous and real, and worth noticing.
None of us gets this right consistently. I don't either. The invitation isn't guilt. It's noticing where something else has quietly taken authority over our discipleship, and choosing differently, one ordinary decision at a time.
Closing
The life of a believer can be difficult. Any life can. We know, probably better than others, just how much messiness is present in our hearts and minds. Sometimes the awareness of our shortcomings weighs heavily, and often we look back and say, “I really wish I would have done that with more joy.”
In the last book of the bible, there is a scene that has captured my imagination for decades. It’s how believers are viewed through the lens of eternity. In Revelation chapter 4, there are 24 “elders” who are representative of all believers of all time. They are dressed in white, clean, freed from sin that so beleaguered us.
(Start reading at Revelation 4:6)
I’ve always wondered. Why did they lay their crowns down?
I’m starting to understand now, the older I get.
One day we’ll all stand before the eternal Christ. I’ll be there. You’ll be there. The people you now miss will be there. The people who will miss us will be there. That deacon in Mississippi will be there. And when we see the face of the loving and living Christ on the throne of history, we will understand.
We will take the crown from our heads and lay them at his feet. We will realize the victory was never ours to win. That the grace and assurance that we so desperate crave was never in jeopardy. That there was never a moment the heart of God wasn’t our home. And there will never be a moment on that side of eternity where carrying the cross wasn’t worth it.
But now, we live here with a road laid out before us. Grace is at this table. Your cross is by the door.
It’s time to get to walking.
A note on the three strands
The treadmill, the allergic reaction, and the vending machine are a pastoral sketch, not a formal theological taxonomy. They are offered as a fair, high-level description of real patterns that historians, sociologists, and theologians have independently documented in American Christianity.
Strand one, the treadmill
Philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard described a widespread but mistaken version of the gospel that treats forgiveness as an ongoing transaction rather than a settled gift, what he called a gospel of sin management, in which faith functions like a bar code that must keep scanning correctly.
Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, HarperCollins, 1998.
Strand two, the allergic reaction
Dietrich Bonhoeffer named this pattern directly in his own century, warning against grace preached without any call to follow Christ. He wrote that "cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross." Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton later documented a similar low-demand faith among American teenagers, centered on feeling good rather than being changed.
Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, SCM Press, 1959. Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Strand three, the vending machine
Historian Kate Bowler's academic history of the American prosperity gospel traces a movement that treats faith itself as a spiritual activator, tying health and wealth to the strength or purity of a believer's belief. Bowler locates part of its roots in what she calls "an American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility."
Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Works consulted
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. SCM Press, 1959.
Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Smith, Christian, and Melinda Lundquist Denton. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. HarperCollins, 1998.
