These two readings — Paul's extraordinary claim that he has been "crucified with Christ" and Christ's demand that a man "refuse himself" — are usually treated as moral exhortations to selflessness. But what if they are precise psychological instructions, describing an interior operation as specific as surgery? This meditation reads them as such: as a map of what must actually die in a person's inner life before anything new can be born, drawing on the esoteric interpretive tradition while belonging finally to no doctrine but direct observation.
First reading
From the letter of Paul to the Galatians — Galatians 2:19-20
Through the law I have died to the law, so that I might truly live for God.
I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I now carry is no longer my own — it is Christ who lives in me. Whatever I live out in this mortal flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and surrendered himself for my sake.
Gospel
From the Gospel of Matthew — Matthew 16:24-27
Then Jesus spoke to his disciples: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him refuse himself, take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever surrenders his life for my sake will discover it.
What does it gain a man to possess the entire world yet forfeit his own soul? And what could a man offer in return for his soul?
For the Son of Man will come arrayed in his Father's glory, accompanied by his angels, and he will repay each person according to what that person has done."
— Interpretation —
Let us begin with the strangeness of what Paul says. “I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I now carry is no longer my own — it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19–20). We read this and perhaps nod, as though we understood. But do we? A man says he has been killed, and yet he is writing a letter. He says the life he carries is not his own, and yet he goes on making decisions, travelling, arguing, suffering. What kind of death is this? And what kind of life follows it?
If we take this literally — and only literally — we arrive at a kind of pious impossibility, a beautiful phrase that means nothing we can act on. But if we understand that Paul is speaking in the language of inner transformation, the words become extraordinarily precise. Something in Paul has died. And something else — something he calls Christ — now lives where that former thing used to be.
Now we must ask: what died?
Turn to the Gospel reading. Christ says to his disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him refuse himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). The phrase in most translations is “deny himself,” but this modernized text says “refuse himself,” and that word is worth pausing over. To refuse something is not merely to push it away. It is to decline it, to say no to its claim on you. Christ is saying: there is something in you that presents itself as you, that claims to be you — and you must refuse that claim.
This is not a moral instruction about being unselfish at dinner parties. It is a description of an interior act of the most radical kind. There is a “self” that operates in us continuously — it reacts, it defends, it compares, it fears, it desires, it narrates. It is what Nicoll, drawing on the Fourth Way tradition, would call the “first man” — the mechanical self, the one built by life, by imitation, by habit, by the sheer momentum of being a biological creature in a social world. This self is not evil. But it is not you — not the you that could grow, that could receive higher meaning, that could be born again into a new level of understanding.
Christ says: refuse it. Not hate it. Not punish it. Refuse its claim to be the whole of you.
And then he adds something that sounds like a paradox but is in fact a law: “Whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever surrenders his life for my sake will discover it” (Matthew 16:25). The word “life” here — in Greek, psyche — means soul, or self. The man who clings to his mechanical self, who identifies with every reaction, every opinion, every emotional storm as though it were his very essence — that man loses the possibility of something deeper. He spends the whole of his existence defending, maintaining, and decorating a self that was never the real one. And at the end he has nothing, because what he defended was never truly his.
But the man who surrenders this false centre — not through force of will alone, but through a sustained inner act of seeing it and refusing its sovereignty — that man discovers something. He discovers what Paul discovered. He finds that there is a life in him that is not manufactured by his reactions. It is given. It comes from above, as it were. It is what Paul calls “Christ who lives in me.”
Now consider the next line: “What does it gain a man to possess the entire world yet forfeit his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26). This is usually read as a warning about greed. But esoterically it goes much deeper. A man can possess every external thing — success, knowledge, reputation, comfort — and still have forfeited his soul, because he has never once separated from the mechanical self long enough to discover that he has a soul. The soul, in this sense, is not something you automatically have. It is something that must be born. It is potential. And it is born only when the first self is refused — gently, persistently, with a kind of holy stubbornness.
Paul’s “I have been crucified with Christ” is not a single dramatic event. It is an ongoing practice. Each moment the mechanical self rises with its claim — I am angry, I am right, I am afraid, I am important — and each moment it is seen, acknowledged, and refused, something is crucified. And something else, quiet and almost imperceptible at first, begins to live.
This is the cross Christ asks us to carry. Not suffering for its own sake. But the daily, hourly work of dying to what we are not, so that what we truly are may finally breathe.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
Scripture: Unified English Version
