Pavlos Mouktaroudis
In today’s Gospel, Christ wants to talk to us about the mystery of His passion and the cross. How, through the cross and death, He made human nature, which He had assumed, a sharer in eternal life. For this reason His death on the cross became a herald of life and immortality, not only for the human nature He Himself bore, but for the whole of the human race. The cross gives joy and incorruption to every human person.
This progress towards the cross and death has become the sole path of salvation for us. If we’re to become sharers in ‘immortal life’, we have also to participate in the sufferings, the cross, the sacrifice of the Lord. We have to mortify our passions and the desires of our carnal nature and, moreover, our very own nature, our body and anything else that might lead us into a life independent of that which is real, which is a relationship with God. This is what Christ meant by ‘Let them follow me’, which we heard in today’s Gospel….
