Road to the Cross

When I was a kid, I used to play a popular American board game called The Game of Life. Each player gets a little car and a blue or pink peg depending on their gender, and as you advance along a winding road you can add other pegs in your car representing a spouse and kids. Through the game, you can get a job, money, and insurance (so exciting!), and the goal of the game is to arrive at the finish line as a millionare. Beginning in Matthew 16:21, Jesus begins his journey to Jerusalem, and this journey would not result in anything resembling the 'good life': romance, family, security, or riches. Instead, it would result in his excruciating death on a cross, where he would be abandoned by most of his closest companions.

Some of us may be thinking, ‘We’re just trying to get our lives back together again after the past year and a half. The idea of journeying with Jesus along an even more difficult road is pretty tough.’ And yet Jesus invites us discover the lives we were always meant to live by giving up the lives we want for ourselves. He said, ‘whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it’ (Matthew 16:25). As we will discover over the coming months, this means doing the work to help our relationships flourish: forgiving one another, dealing with sin and conflict constructively, and staying faithful to the covenant of marriage. And instead of finding our personal value in worldly wealth and significance, we find our value in serving others and walking with them in the good times and bad. We lose our lives by becoming like children of our Father in heaven.