Today’s gospel reads a tad dark coming from the Light of the World: deny yourself, lose your life, repay each, taste death. The narrative seemingly revolves around death from the one sent to give life, but we know that Jesus loves to teach in contradictions.

One kind of death the Lord is revealing here is an end to and denial of our preconceptions of who the Messiah is and what he has come to do.

This passage comes right after Peter’s great confession in response to Jesus asking, “But who do you say that I am?” You might recall Peter’s reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus says: “Blessed are you, Simon . . . for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.” (Matthew 16:15-17)

Notice that Jesus asks Peter, “who do you say that I am,” not “who do you think I am.” These are two very different questions. The latter depends on Peter’s conception of who the Messiah should be. The former presupposes the death and denial of Peter’s constructed ideas of who Jesus is.

In asking, “who do you say that I am,” Jesus is asking Peter for a response made possible only by a posture of receiving what has been generously and gratuitously revealed to him in love, not to invent the answer using his limited faculties or information from the world around him.

It is startling to consider that the typical human posture now is insulating. Our heads and hearts are bent, perpetually curled over our devices, taking in all that the digitally constructed world has to offer and allowing ourselves to be formed by it. How might we begin to shift our posture to one of openness, to lift our eyes from our screens to the heavens, and, like Peter, lose our lives to save them?