Luke 9,22-25 – Ash Thursday
“If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). It is contained in this verse from the Gospel of Luke the entire program of Christian life. This is not a generic exhortation, but a precise indication. Believing in Jesus means learning to walk behind Him, without claiming to precede Him. It means recognizing that we do not set the direction, but that we can follow in its footsteps.
Following him means walk the paths that He himself has traced with his life, with his choices, with his way of loving. The second element is self-denial. It is not a form of self-contempt, nor a masochistic attitude. It is, rather, an act of freedom towards your ego. Denying ourselves means not making our point of view absolute, not making our self the ultimate criterion of judgement. Only those who know how to take the right distance from themselves can be said to be truly free. Otherwise, we remain prisoners of our own reactions, our own impulses, our own fears.
Finally, Jesus speaks of the daily cross. It does not invite the pursuit of suffering as an end in itself. The cross is not the taste of pain, but the acceptance of reality. Taking up your cross every day means embrace the concreteness of your life without discarding anything: limits, hardships, responsibilities, difficult relationships, personal fragilities. It is the opposite of the comfortable selection of existence. We cannot choose life as we choose a dessert, retaining only what is pleasant and rejecting the rest. Christian maturity consists in taking responsibility for the whole of reality. The cross, then, is not a symbol of defeat, but the sign of a love that does not run away from the complexity of life.
Following Christ means accepting that the path to fullness passes through this logic: not the elimination of weight, but its transformation; not the escape from reality, but its embrace. This is where faith becomes concrete, daily, embodied. And this is where the Gospel stops being theory and becomes a path.
Thursday 19 February 2026 – (Thursday after Ash Wednesday)
