Assyria ran the ancient Near East, and Nineveh ran Assyria. Sennacherib rebuilt the capital behind roughly seven miles of wall, fed it with an aqueduct that carried water across thirty miles of plain, and stocked its palaces with the take from every kingdom his armies had cracked open. Ask a farmer in Judah around 640 BC to name the most permanent thing on earth and he would have pointed north.

By 612 BC the city was rubble. It stayed rubble so thoroughly that when a Greek army marched past the mound two centuries later, nobody living nearby could tell them whose city it had been.

Nahum wrote before any of that happened. His whole book is a funeral oration delivered over a city that was still very much alive, still collecting tribute, still the safest bet in the world. And the Gospel today asks the question Nineveh answers: “What will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?”

Nineveh made that trade at civilizational scale. It got the plunder, the walls, the water, the empire. Then the accounts closed exactly the way Jesus says they close. The uncomfortable part of the reading is how ordinary the arithmetic is once you shrink it down. Nineveh’s version was big enough to see from orbit. Ours arrives in pieces small enough to look sensible at the time.

Today the Church also keeps the optional memorial of Saint Cajetan, a canon lawyer with a career inside the Roman Curia who walked away from it to nurse incurables in Venice. His own friends thought he had embarrassed the family. Hold that next to the Gospel, because he understood the exchange rate better than they did.

The Readings

First Reading: Nahum 2:1, 3; 3:1-3, 6-7

Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace! Keep your feasts, O Judah, fulfil your vows, for never again shall the wicked come against you, he is utterly cut off. For the Lord is restoring the majesty of Jacob as the majesty of Israel, for plunderers have stripped them and ruined their branches.

Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and booty, no end to the plunder! The crack of whip, and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end; they stumble over the bodies!

I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a gazingstock. And all who look on you will shrink from you and say, Wasted is Nineveh; who will bemoan her? Whence shall I seek comforters for her?

Gospel: Matthew 16:24-28

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.”

Scriptural Analysis

Start with the prophet’s name. Nahum means comfort, and that is the joke the whole book turns on. He is writing sometime between 663 BC, when Assyria sacked the Egyptian city of Thebes (an event he throws in Nineveh’s face at 3:8), and 612 BC, when the Medes and Babylonians burned Nineveh to the ground. Judah in those years was a vassal state paying tribute to a power that had already swallowed the northern kingdom in 722 and deported ten tribes into oblivion. Sennacherib had come within a siege ramp of Jerusalem in 701. Assyrian kings did not hide what they did to conquered cities; their own annals brag in detail about flaying prisoners and stacking heads at the gates. Nahum’s audience did not need the imagery explained to them.

So the lectionary opens the reading on a note of relief. “Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace!” A runner is coming over the ridge with news, and the news is that the empire has fallen. Judah can hold its festivals again without wondering whether this is the year the army comes. (If you look this verse up in a Catholic Bible you may find it printed at Nahum 1:15; the lectionary follows the Hebrew numbering, where it stands at 2:1.) Isaiah uses the same image of beautiful feet on the mountains for the end of the Babylonian exile, and Saint Paul takes it from there and applies it to the preaching of the Gospel itself (Isaiah 52:7; Romans 10:15). The Church has always heard something more than military reporting in that runner. The pattern of a herald cresting a hill with news that the oppressor is finished is the shape of the Gospel before the Gospel arrives.

Then the tone breaks. “Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and booty, no end to the plunder!” The Hebrew of verses 2 and 3 is almost cinematic, clipped noun phrases with no verbs, the sound of a cavalry charge rendered as a list: whip, wheel, horse, chariot. Nineveh’s own palace walls were carved with exactly these scenes, chariots running down enemies, bodies piled in heaps, and the reliefs were commissioned as propaganda. Nahum takes the empire’s favorite artwork and points it back at the empire. The city that filled the world with corpses now supplies them.

And then the last blow, which is not violence at all. “I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a gazingstock. And all who look on you will shrink from you and say, Wasted is Nineveh; who will bemoan her? Whence shall I seek comforters for her?” A city that made the whole earth pay attention will end up with nobody willing to sit with it. The prophet whose name means comfort closes the account by announcing there are no comforters left. That is what the death of an idol looks like from the inside. Everything Nineveh accumulated bought it exactly no mourners.

The one detail that keeps this from being nationalist gloating is Jonah. Roughly a century earlier God sent a prophet to this same city, and the city repented in sackcloth, and God spared it (Jonah 3:5-10). Nineveh had already been handed a way out once and taken it. The verdict in Nahum falls on a people who received mercy and went back to the whip. God’s patience with Nineveh was real, and it was also not infinite in the way we casually assume mercy must be. He gave them decades. He does not give them forever.

Turn now to the Gospel, and notice where Jesus is standing. This scene sits at Caesarea Philippi, in the shadow of Mount Hermon, immediately after Peter confesses him as the Christ and then tries to talk him out of the cross. Saint John Chrysostom reads verse 24 as the direct answer to that attempt: Peter had said “God forbid, Lord, this shall never happen to you,” and Jesus replies not only that he himself must suffer, but that Peter will not be saved without walking the same road.[1] The rebuke and the invitation are the same sentence.

Look at how the invitation is framed. “If any man would come after me.” Chrysostom notices the conditional and makes something of it. Jesus leaves the man free, and a hearer left free is drawn in more surely than one who is shoved.[2] The offer also goes to everybody. Chrysostom lists it out: man or woman, king or slave, anyone at all. Carrying a cross is the ordinary Christian job description, handed to the whole world at once.

Three things follow. Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me. On the first, Saint Gregory the Great is worth sitting with: “unless a man departs from himself, he does not draw near to Him who is above him.”[3] Gregory knows the obvious objection, that if I leave myself, there is nobody left to do the leaving. His answer is that we are two things at once, what God made us and what sin made us, so denying yourself means walking away from the second in order to become the first. Elsewhere he puts it even more plainly: a man denies himself when he is changed for the better, begins to be what he was not, and stops being what he was.[4] Self-denial in the Catholic sense is a matter of becoming somebody.

On the second, Saint Jerome is characteristically brief: he takes up his cross who is crucified to the world, and the man to whom the world is crucified follows his crucified Lord.[5] Gregory adds a distinction that most of us skip. There are two ways to carry the cross. One is bodily, through abstinence and self-denial in the flesh. The other is in the heart, through compassion, letting another person’s suffering actually cost you something. And Gregory warns that both go bad on their own; fasting can turn into a performance and pity can turn into indulging someone’s sin, which is why Jesus attaches “and follow me” to the end of the sentence.[6] The cross has to be carried behind a particular person, in his direction, or it becomes a private project.

We should also be honest about what the word meant to the men hearing it. These disciples had seen crucifixions. After the revolt in 4 BC the Roman governor Varus crucified two thousand Jews at once, and Galileans of Jesus’ generation grew up with that memory. He is handing his friends the actual instrument, the public and shameful one. The Catechism ties this verse directly to our share in his redeeming sacrifice, and it calls taking up the cross daily the surest path of penance available to an ordinary Christian.[7]

Then comes the arithmetic. “What will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life?” Chrysostom presses the second question hard. If you lose money, you can produce more money and buy it back. If you lose your soul, there is nothing in creation you can hand over in exchange, no second soul, no property, no achievement.[8] Origen answers the question anyway, and his answer is the whole Gospel in one line: God has given the ransom for the souls of men, the precious blood of his Son.[9] So Jesus asks what a man can pay, the honest answer is nothing, and the price gets paid on Calvary by the man asking. That is why he can afford to ask for our lives. He is not asking for anything he has not already spent on us.

Verse 27 keeps the judgment concrete: the Son of Man comes in his Father’s glory and repays each one according to what he has done. Jerome’s comment on that line has teeth. There is no difference of Jew or Gentile, man or woman, poor or rich, because at that judgment it is works and not persons that are weighed.[10] Catholic teaching has never let go of that. Grace is free, and what grace produces in us is real, and it will be looked at.

Finally, the promise that sounds strangest: “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” Saint Remigius and Saint Bede both read this as fulfilled in the three disciples who went up the mountain and saw him transfigured.[11] Chrysostom says the same thing: Jesus gave them a glimpse of the coming glory in advance, as much as they could bear, so that his death would not crush them. Matthew proves the point by putting the Transfiguration in the very next verses. Yesterday the Church kept that feast. Today she hands us the promise that was answered on Tabor six days later. The order matters. Jesus asks for the cross, and then, before anyone has to carry it, he shows three of them how the story ends.

Daily Application

Nobody wakes up and decides to trade their soul for the world. Nineveh did not either. Empires get built one defensible decision at a time, and so do the lives that quietly go wrong. The particular grace of today’s readings is that they force the question early, while the trade is still small enough to reverse.

So do the audit, and do it with names and numbers attached. What has the last year of your life actually purchased, and what did you spend to buy it? A promotion bought with the hours your kids needed. A reputation kept intact by a silence you should have broken. A grudge you are still funding because dropping it would mean admitting something about yourself. Every one of those is a small version of Nineveh’s ledger, and none of them looked insane at the time. Jesus asks a narrower question than whether those things are good. He asks whether you know what they cost.

Then take Gregory’s second cross seriously, because it is the one most of us dodge. He said the heart carries a cross when it is pained by compassion for another. That is a costly kind of suffering, because it is entirely optional. You can insulate yourself from the aging parent, the friend whose marriage is failing, the neighbor whose grief has gone on longer than is comfortable. Nobody will fault you. Choosing to let someone else’s pain get inside you and slow you down is a real denial of self, and it will not show up on any ledger you can read. That is exactly what makes it a cross rather than an accomplishment.

Saint Cajetan is a good patron for this. He had the whole world available to him in miniature: a doctorate in law, a post in the Curia, a family name worth protecting. He gave it up to work in a hospital for people nobody could cure and to join a community of men at the bottom of Italian society, and his friends treated it as a disgrace. Later he founded a lending fund in Naples to keep the poor out of the hands of usurers, and that small operation eventually became the Bank of Naples. He never saw most of the fruit. He watched the Council of Trent open and worried it would fail, and he died before it finished. His answer to that anxiety was that God is the same in Naples as he is in Venice, with or without a council. He kept working anyway, which is what a man does when he has already decided that God’s accounting is the only one that will be read aloud.

This week the ask will probably be small and hard at the same time: an hour, a confession, an apology, a habit, a resentment you have been feeding. Give it. The one who asks has already paid the ransom nobody else could pay, and he settles his accounts in glory.

---

Notes

1. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew 55, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, on Matthew 16:24.
2. Chrysostom, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:24.
3. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 32.2, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:24.
4. Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel 1.10, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:24.
5. Jerome, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:24.
6. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 32.3, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:24.
7. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2000), nos. 618 and 1435.
8. Chrysostom, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:26.
9. Origen, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:26.
10. Jerome, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:27.
11. Remigius, with Bede on Luke 9:27, in Catena Aurea, on Matthew 16:28.

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)