Variety: Mark 8:34-38

³⁴ Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save their life^[b] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. ³⁶ What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? ³⁷ Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? ³⁸ If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.’  (Mark 8:34-38)

“From gospel to life and life to gospel” is a phrase from the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order of which I am a member. 

I understood “from gospel to life” to mean that I was to read the gospel of Jesus and apply what I found there to how I lived my life. But “life to gospel”? What might that mean?

I had always understood Jesus’s teaching to “take up your cross and follow me” simply as a call to bear patiently with the suffering inherent in daily life.  However, I came to a totally different understanding after a long, frigid day spent at a climate protest in December 2019. Rereading the story (in Mark 8) I suddenly understood that Jesus was not speaking about patience with everyday suffering. As he faced escalating pressure—including from his friends—to stop speaking out against injustice, Jesus made it crystal clear that following him would require self-sacrifice, inconvenience, and possibly danger. How could I have missed that before? Maybe this new way of hearing was what “life to gospel” meant.

Michele Dunne