Identification ===> Justification?

Gentle reader, I have written before about the idea (controversial in theological circles some years back) of justification in Christ for eternal life resulting from identification with Christ in this life.  Yesterday in Sunday worship, the pastor referenced Matthew 10:32 to make a particular point in his sermon.  The point he made was solid, but I was thinking in a different direction altogether from what he used it for.  Here's the reference:

32 “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. 33 But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven."

Jesus here is sending out the 12 apostles for their preaching & healing tour, and giving them what amounts to the "pre-game pep talk" by the coach, last minute instructions, encouragements and all that.  It's also the passage where He goes on to say he has not come to bring peace but a sword, to divide families because He demands allegiance to Him above allegiance to family, culture, country, etc.  

It struck me, listening to this, that this is what Saint Paul meant by "identifying with Christ in His death, so that we may also identify with Him in His life eternal".  (loosely adapted from Romans 6, Galatians 2, Colossians 2-3.)

In seminary I studied the various theories of the Atonement (judicial, substitutionary, victorious, etc.), and studied some of the unifying themes of Saint Paul's theology, including the "in Christ" or "with Christ" theme.  The weaknesses of some of the Atonement concepts and the mystical "in Christ" idea all tickled at me, bothered me, until I read the book by N.T. Wright "Justification", which finally made it all clear to me and opened up the notion of identification with Christ as key to understanding our justification before God, and the balance between the free gift of saving faith, and our free will exercise of it.  It also helped me understand God's "identification with the poor", or as Catholic Social Teaching puts it: God's preferential option for the poor.

But in all that study, I never connected Matthew 10:32 ff with identification with Christ.  Yet in this passage, Jesus Himself both makes clear the simplicity of the idea and the difficulty of carrying it out for a lifetime.  In 2 Timothy 2:11-13, Saint Paul writes:

              "Here is a trustworthy saying:

If we died with him,

    we will also live with him;

if we endure,

    we will also reign with him.

If we disown him,

    he will also disown us;

 

if we are faithless,

    he remains faithful,

    for he cannot disown himself."

Never was the cost of that identification with Christ so great as it was for the early church.  They understood; they faced death day and night for that identification with Jesus.  We may yet come to understand, as holding to belief in Jesus and the authority of the Scriptures becomes increasingly outside of the mainstream in this country.  We may yet come to understand the parable of the seed and the sower in Matt. 13:1-9 in which some of what sprouts from the seed of the Gospel withers and fades away.  Identification with Christ is a marathon, not a sprint; if we endure, we will also reign with Him.  If we disown Him, He will disown us.  This life presages the next.