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When Solidarity Comes with a Personal Cost

When Solidarity Comes with a Personal Cost

Last updated on: August 26, 2026 at 11:39 am by Herb Montgomery

When Solidarity Comes with a Personal Cost 2026-08-26T11:39:45-04:00 Herb Montgomery

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Jesus’ accusation that Peter has “merely human concerns” can be read as a critique of change methods organized around power, privilege, security, and self-preservation. “Human concerns” are not necessarily evil but become problematic when safety and protecting one’s status matter more than justice, compassion, and faithfulness to those who are vulnerable.

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This is Part 2 of the series When Solidarity Comes with a Personal Cost

(Read this series from its beginning here.)

The word “Satan,” meaning adversary or accuser, is especially significant. Peter becomes a “stumbling block” to Jesus because his resistance to Jesus’ path could divert Jesus from confronting the structures that produce suffering. Justice work sometimes requires accepting discomfort, risk, and sacrifice rather than choosing the easier path of protecting ourselves from conflict.

So this passage challenges Jesus followers to examine whether they seek a comfortable religion or a transformative faith. Jesus calls his followers beyond the instinct to preserve power and privilege, and his response to Peter insists that genuine discipleship requires solidarity with suffering people and a willingness to confront injustice, even when doing so includes a personal cost.

A critique of harmful traditional interpretations of Jesus’ next words in our reading can challenge the assumption that losing one’s life is necessarily the highest expression of faithfulness: “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” has often been interpreted as a call to self-denial, sacrifice, and even death. Yet, such an interpretation deserves careful examination, especially because many people, women specifically, have historically been taught that love means giving themselves away, enduring suffering, putting others first, or sacrificing their own needs for the sake of family, community, or religious ideals.

Jesus’ taking up the cross does not have to mean choosing death. Indeed, the cross represents a system of political and religious violence that sought to destroy life. Jesus does not glorify the violence done to him but confronts it by refusing to surrender the truth, dignity, and life he embodies. His journey toward Jerusalem can be understood not as a desire for death but as a refusal to let oppression determine the meaning of his life.

From this perspective, “losing one’s life” can mean refusing to live according to the values of domination, exploitation, and fear. It does not necessarily mean abandoning the value of one’s self. Faithfulness requires precisely the opposite: holding tightly to the gift of life and refusing to surrender it to those who would diminish, control, or destroy it. Jesus didn’t choose death. He refused to let go of his hold on life even when threatened with death if he did not do so. Death does not bring life. Life brings life.

We do not need more religious messages telling us that our worth is found in self-sacrifice. Love does not require self-erasure. Compassion does not demand surrendering one’s dignity. Caring for others should not mean abandoning oneself. Again, death does not bring life simply because suffering has been endured. Life brings life when people protect it, nurture it, and refuse to let go of it. In the Jesus story, God does not triumph over injustice, violence and death using more violent death, even just one more death. God overcomes death through reversing, undoing, and triumphing over Jesus’ violent death through resurrecting life. Jesus’ words in our reading this week can be understood as an invitation to hold on to the self, to dignity, to justice, and to life itself. To follow Jesus is not necessarily to seek the cross, but to resist the forces that make crosses inevitable. So the cross only becomes a part of following Jesus when unjust systems threaten us with a cross like they threatened Jesus. It is in those moments of threat from unjust systems that we paradoxically find our life through refusing to let go of life and what is right even when there is a risk of consequences for doing so. Sometimes the most courageous act of discipleship is loving oneself enough to refuse to let go of life.

In this context, Jesus’ words, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”, offer a powerful critique of a society that measures success by wealth, power, possessions, and status. Jesus’ words challenge the assumption that gaining more necessarily means living better, and they also ask us, when faced with a kind of bribery to be silent about injustice, at what cost are we choosing to stay silent? We may gain the world but lose touch with our humanity. What does going along to get along cost a person on an inner level? A person may accumulate enormous wealth and influence while becoming spiritually, morally and/or ethically impoverished.

These words also question systems that allow some people to “gain the whole world” while others are deprived of food, housing, dignity, opportunity, and security. Wealth gained through exploitation, oppression, the suffering of others, or even through merely remaining silent about such comes at the cost of the soul. Jesus therefore shifts the question from “How much can I acquire?” to “What kind of person am I becoming, and what is the cost of my success to my inner self and others?”

The “soul” represents more than private spirituality. It points toward the deepest center of human identity, conscience, compassion, and relationship with others. To forfeit one’s soul is to lose the capacity to recognize another person’s humanity and even lose connection with our own. Jesus’ teaching calls us to reject a culture of material gain through injustice, and seek a society shaped by justice, compassion, solidarity, and human dignity instead. The truly valuable life is not the one that possesses the most, but the one that refuses to gain at another person’s expense.

Lastly this week, Jesus’ words, “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels,” evoke the powerful imagery of Daniel 7, where the “Son of Man” appears as a human figure receiving authority from God after oppressive beasts representing unjust and violent empires parade through the scene. In Jesus’ first-century context, this imagery could resonate with Jewish hopes for liberation from Roman domination and the restoration of justice. The Son of Man represents an alternative to imperial power: authority grounded not in violence, conquest, or exploitation but in justice and compassion. Jesus’ language therefore speaks to hope that unjust empires will not be the final word in Earth’s history. And that is a hope that each of us alive today can lean into.

Begin each day being inspired toward love, compassion, justice and action. Free.

General Christian

Politics and Religion

About Herb Montgomery

Herb Montgomery, director of Renewed Heart Ministries, is an author and adult religious educator helping Christians explore the intersection of their faith with love, compassion, action, and societal justice. You can read more about the author here.

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