Speaking to all the disciples, Jesus goes on to lay down the conditions for any who want to follow him: it means taking up one’s own cross and losing one’s life in order to find it. This is the path that Jesus must go and the path that all who would seek association with him must also be prepared to embrace. The fact that the so recently exalted Peter had so much difficulty with it and even that Jesus had difficulty with it should be for us all a source of comfort. Christian discipleship is not Stoic indifference. Both Peter’s remonstrance and Jeremiah’s complaint will often echo in our hearts in the daily struggle to go with Jesus along the costly prophetic way. Our ‘bodies’ refers not simply to our physical bodies but to our whole pattern of bodily life, everything we do or say. To ‘offer (our) bodies’ in this sense as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God entails a similar preparedness to discern and follow what is not the way of the world but the way of God.