Dear friends,

There is hardly any other passage where Jesus reacts so abruptly and harshly as he does in this moment with Peter: “Away with you, behind me, you Satan!”  Jesus is tempted again. 

We meet this dark figure at the very beginning of the Gospel when Jesus is tempted by it in the desert.

Satan speaks twice: first through the mouth of Peter, then through the mouth of the High Priest standing under the Cross who says: “If you the Messiah come down from the cross and we shall believe you”. The same topic: no suffering, no Cross!

“Get behind me” can mean two things: “get away from me” or “follow me, because your way is not God’s way; your ideas of freedom, happiness, and salvation are not God’s plans; they are what men understand by those things”.

I can sympathize with Peter. He means well for Jesus, not wanting to see him suffer.

What a profound change of thinking is demanded of us here! Everything rightly resists sorrow and the cross. We are created for happiness and not for the cross.

Peter changed his ways of thinking after the Pentecost, after the experience of the Holy Spirit and followed Jesus, even to death on the Cross, which he suffered in Nero’s Circus, the place where the Basilica of Saint Peter stands today.

We too are called to follow Jesus on His journey to Golgotha, to the cross. The Gospel seems to give for granted that everyone of us has an ailment, “a cross” to carry and to come to terms with. In Luke’s gospel there is something added to this saying of Jesus: it reads “Every day” so it is an everyday struggle that everybody has to do. The cross can be a physical ailment, a situation, a person, a physical defect, any thing. Paul had what he calls “a thorn in the flesh” that made he cry out for help(2 Cor. 12:7-10). And the only help was: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness”.
The Cross is an integral part of our lives.

We can not run away from the Cross as we can not run away from our shadow.

No matter how much an ox might try to do away with the yoke on his neck, it has to curry it. It can shake its head, scratch its neck the result will be the same: a wounded neck to be carried on the neck. The cross is not something Christians have invented: it is part of our life. Jesus teaches us how to make sense of it. The love with which we carry it is the balm that soothes the wound.

This cross is our inflated ego. The cause of our suffering is our ego. The heat signals friction, moral suffering signals the presence of the ego.It is strange: we are a burden to ourselves.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality.  In Asia is known as “to save face! The ego is simply our symbol of ourselves. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role we play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

The basic question is: who are we?  What are we really behind the mask of our apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego? Strangely enough: our real ego emerges at carnival or Mardi’ Gras: the mask we were for the occasion more than hiding, in reality display publicly who we’d like to be, who we are.

I am convinced that the only way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. The best observatory for life is our “death-bed” when things are seen in their true colors.

Most of us don’t live; we are just keeping the body alive. That's not life. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it. But if you're protecting your life, you're dead. The false self, the false EGO has to die for the new self to appear. We know the famous statue of “David” by Michelangelo. It was only a discarded piece of marble in the courtyeard of the “Palazzo della Signoria”, the City Hall, of Florence. Michelangelo saw it and, in his words, he “chipped away with hammer and chisel” the surplus marble and the statue emerged by itself. Life is chipping away our false ego for the real person to emerge.

Life is for the gambler. That's what Jesus was saying. Are we ready to risk it? Do you know when you're ready to risk it? When we discover, when we realize that this thing that people call life is not really life. People mistakenly think that living is keeping the body alive.

We waste our life with our anxieties, our worries, our concerns, our burdens. What we call reality is in reality a dream. Buddhist call it “illusion” the Bible calls it “vanity”. We have to wake up! Before death wakes us up!

When we look at the sun, we are seeing it where it was eight and a half minutes ago, not where it is now. Because it takes a ray of the sun eight and a half minutes to get to us. Stars that we believe to be there in front of us, in reality might have ceased to be long ago: they have been sending light to us for hundreds of thousands of years.

It's only when we are afraid of life that we fear death.

Death is resurrection.: the death of the caterpillar is the resurrection the coming to life of the butterfly.

We're talking not about some resurrection that will happen but about one that is happening right now.

If we would die to the past, if we would die to every minute, we would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death.

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.