2 weeks into Lent now. How's it going for you? Are you resolute in spurning chocolate, biscuits and alcohol or already exhausted?. Perhaps this year you feel you’ve already given up more than enough and any more deprivation will have a decidedly negative impact. That’s a perfectly reasonable view. It’s interesting, though, how the idea of “giving things up for Lent” seems to have survived in our emphatically post Christian society. I guess for many it's just another chance to have a go at those self improvement measures that foundered back January but if that’s so, then I think we're a bit off course...and our gospel would seem to support me. Listen! If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Deny yourself.Take up your cross That's sounds, somehow, a whole lot more serious than stepping away from the chocolate. Let's look more closely and try to discover what this Scripture might mean for us. Peter, in a new self appointed role as Jesus's PR man, already suspects that his Master might be more than just an extraordinary teacher...indeed he has just reached a milestone at Caeserea Philippines, declaring when pressed "You are the Messiah But by their nature Messiah were supposed to triumph. It's kind of the point...so small wonder that Peter does not want to pursue this line of suffering, death and resurrection. But even as Peter tries to silence Jesus, to curb his depressing pronouncements, Jesus tells him that he's got it wrong. Death IS actually what it's all about... Death of the self. And that’s supposed to be “GOOD news”?! You can't blame Peter if he put his head in his hands and groaned! I can't think of a message less calculated to win friends and influence people but Jesus just doesn't seem to care. Did you imagine this as part of the deal for you, personally, this morning?It looks very much as if Jesus is set on putting most of us off before we even start our Christian journeys. You can’t say we haven’t been warned. If you've been baptised, you will have had the cross traced on your forehead. I often tell parents that it’s an invisible name-tape, asserting “This child belongs to Jesus” - but it’s also, less consolingly,an invisible reminder of the shape our lives should take as baptized members of God’s church. The “I” of ego crossed out by God’s transforming love. As a priest it was hard for me, this year, to be unable to revisit that microcosm of death and hope that is represented by the Ash Wednesday liturgy, in that moment when we trace the cross on faithful foreheads, to mark a staging post on the journey that began, and will end, in the same way. Can I invite you right now to take a few seconds to remind yourself that you bear this mark..Trace that shape. That’s your commissioning badge, the cross on your forehead... “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ”. We carry a cross, you and I, as a constant reminder that discipleship is absolutely Not for the faint-hearted. Jesus expands this “Let them deny themselves” Words that are anathema in our age of self fulfillment and individualism, where self-care can sometimes too easily slip into self-indulgence...and it’s still not just about chocolate. Jesus is saying, quite simply, that we need to learn that we cannot exist as the centre of our own universe...that a world that runs on the principle of unrestrained self fulfilment for all is very quickly going to become a place of conflict and unhappiness...that a little ego goes a very long way. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,[a] will save it.For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life That’s the stuff of tragedy, of course. A few years ago I had tickets to the RSC for “Oppenheimer” - a very powerful drama about the man responsible for developing the atomic bomb. As the plot developed we saw him repeatedly making choices that seemed to stem from his own pride in his scientific achievements, choices that divorced him step by step from his own humanity. The success of the project became all important. While at first there was talk of the deterrent power of the bomb, of the way that it would cut war short and so save countless lives, soon it became clear that it was now an end in itself. It was a chilling experience, watching scientific brilliance dedicated ever more deeply to a cataclysmic cause – and as we emerged, the big question in our group was “How do you live with yourself afterwards”. It seemed to me that we had been watching the experience of someone losing their own soul before our very eyes – and losing it as a result of a determination to hold on to the ego and all that went with it. That's really what's going on at the centre of everything...and where we should focus if we're serious about engaging with Lent or engaging with our faith. It's a struggle of life and death as our human tendency to “me first” contends with the incredible power of self-giving love that is God's very essence. It’s particularly tough this year, as we have had so much taken away already and we have been made conscious, in some cases for the first time, of what it means to live with a real knowledge of our own mortality. It has been both natural and necessary, I think, to cut ourselves some slack.. We’ve carried a whole stack of unexpected additional crosses – loneliness, financial insecurity, fear for our loved ones and for ourselves – through a landscape in which it has been uniquely hard for us to support each other So – being kind to ourselves has mattered. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The great commandment to love carries within it that reminder that we DO need to love ourselves...but there’s a world of difference between loving ourselves in ways that enable our flourishing and abandoning all restraint in a “me first” agenda that blights the lives of others. We’ve seen that kind of rampant egotism at work on the world stage of late... but we may well recognise less obtrusive versions of it within ourselves... habits of settled selfishness that we don’t even think to question. Now is the time to root them out… Lent is about so much more than chocolate. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,[a] will save it. Thankfully, Jesus doesn't simply talk enigmatically. - he models in his own person this upside down way of being, and invites us to live it too. On the cross he will become a parable, losing his own life to gain it for all time and for all people, transforming life, death and eternity.. But the point about a parable is that it shows us truth so that we can live it. In other words, this is where we come in. We will all have our own unique burdens – made out of the stuff of our own lives and experience... Of failure at work or loneliness at home; of a difficult relationship, a sick relative, a deep bereavement...things we might well prefer to jettison, but find ourselves carrying day by day. Your cross will be quite unlike mine. If we looked at them side by side, one might look easier, more easy to manage – or the reverse. We don’t get to choose, anyway. Your cross is yours, mine my own. We can’t carry one another’s crosses, though we might perhaps walk side by side, and encourage each other along the way. While I may long to, I can’t take the weight under which you stagger...- but Jesus can and Jesus does, if only you’ll let him. As we hesitantly kneel to shoulder the weight, Jesus steps in and carries it for us....the fear and sadness, disappointment, anger, doubt, and denial....the pressing weight of broken humanity. He carries it, step by painful step, setting his face towards Jerusalem and the long, slow journey to the cross... But –there’s an invitation. We can choose to carry it too...to learn to be Christ-like by sharing in his suffering even as we hope to share in his glory. He knows this road so well, invites us on this arduous journey of discipleship because he knows that the way of the cross leads through pain and suffering to the new life of Easter. Peter could not believe that the route to the Kingdom lay through the death of his Master ...but we can look at the cross with the perfect, 20/20 vision of hindsight... It’s true that for now we are still struggling, longing to hug our dear ones, wondering if our jobs will survive, uncertain what will happen in our own unfinished stories, unsure if it will all come out right one day, We long for reassurance that it WILL be alright, are desperate to press on to the happy ending – to the lifting of lockdown, to loving reunions, to the new life of Easter transforming the world. But let’s pause and reflect, as we each settle the weight of our own particular cross more comfortably on our shoulders., because here and now, in our struggles and uncertainties, GOD IS WITH US, And yes - Easter is coming, nothing can stop it and through the weary miles ahead we will never travel alone.