Together We Lead
minimum, we must not work against the gospel. To put this in the positive, to answer the call we have to agree with the gospel.
The Call Is an Invitation to Follow a Person (v. 24) In verse 24, the broader context of discipleship, or more generally a call to minister in Jesus’s authority, is set. Jesus used the opportunity in Caesarea Philippi and the discussion of the gospel to transition into a definition or description of costly discipleship: “Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.’” To understand the implications of what Jesus was calling his disciples to, a consideration of his terms may be helpful. Why did Jesus use two terms that seem synonymous in this call, and what significance is highlighted by the difference in these words? The word for come after holds the emphasis “to go on a course (presumably of someone specifically who had walked it before).”5 The term for follow does carry the same meaning, generally, but with a slightly different nuance: “to move behind someone in the same direction” or “to follow or accompany someone who takes the lead.”6 Perhaps the truth Jesus intended is that if anyone wants to live like he has lived, walk like he has walked, do that which he has been seen doing, in other words, “come after me,” then naturally this one must follow or walk closely behind him. Conceptually this makes sense. Jesus’s statement is not complicated; it is logical. Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, ed. Frederick William Danker, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 394. This lexicon will hereafter be referred to as BDAG (Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich). 6 BDAG, 36. 5
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