Sunday Reflection: I Cannot Possibly Lose My Life

I managed, in listening to the bible on the Internet, to fall asleep and remain that way for most of the minor prophets. I woke up somewhere in the middle of Matthew, startled by the terrifying words of Jesus, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

My task, later, shall be to back track and have another go at Obediah through Malachi, but until I have time for that, I do think perhaps this was the singular necessary theological truth that I needed to hear.

Because every moment of the out working of ordinary life is about trying to save my own particular “life”. There is always a violent storm of self preservation raging in all my thoughts and works. Not only so but I live with a lot of people, and every single one of them is also trying to save his or her own life, to order everything so that nobody picks grain on his sabbath or moves her kindle fire to some other location or tramples any of his feelings in any matter whatsoever. Each life is being preserved against all the others at all cost.

Of course, Jesus is talking about my literal life, and my spiritual one, and my metaphorical one. He is talking about every tiny facet of my existence, including how I conceive of myself and how others think of me. He is talking about my ability to physically die as well as every small opportunity to set my capacious ego in the dust bun bin in favor of somebody else’s plans and feelings.

There is no way for me to do this. I cannot possibly die. Neither in my interior or my exterior. That many try to slay me, and that I may accidentally bring about my own death through idiocy and selfishness does very little to diminish my profound efforts of self preservation. I do not want to die. I do not know how to die. I do not have plans to die. I do not even want to think about dying.

I was trying to explain, last week, to a friend, that Jesus, though he was killed, was not really killed. He didn’t have the life sucked out of him. He willingly ‘gave himself up’ to death. Those are the words we use to describe something humanly impossible. He was on the cross for three hours, and could have been there much longer before dying. The ordinary person would have fought and breathed, and death would have finally taken over against the will of the person up there. We don’t relinquish the breath of our bodies any more than we relinquish anything else. To let go and give up your life is extraordinary, impossible, strange.

And, just to clarify, the cross was not a suicidal moment. We might take our own lives, we might give up and wrest ourselves out of this mortal space, but that action is still one of self preservation. It is just as broken and diseased as everything else the human person does to protect and preserve the ego. The person who ends it all hasn’t laid down his life any more than anyone else has. We can’t do it.

There’s a carelessness about Jesus’ words. If I just lose my life, like I might lose my bible–doesn’t matter how carefully I remind myself to put it properly away every Sunday, I always come home and plunk it down, in a fit of tiredness, and then spend the rest of the week looking everywhere for it–I might have a chance. If I was breezy and careless about my life, my ego, my plans, my expectations, my sense of need, my judgements, my worries, it seems like I might, while searching around for whatever, actually smack into Jesus, I might find him.

But while I can be breezy and careless about other things and other people, who is ever careless about herself? Himself? Nobody. The self is the most certain and precious and necessary element of existence. And Jesus says that I must just lose it, plunk it down and wander away, lay it down, die.

And if I do this, especially, and really only for the sake of Jesus, I will find it again. How can this be? How can I just find it? If I don’t look after myself, who else will?

And that is the crux of the Christian life, the life bound up and preserved in Christ. The only one who was able to lay down his life, to just let go of it, to die, freely, both physically and spiritually, that one has the power to hang on to you and preserve you a thousand times more than you can for yourself. All your efforts at self preservation are ridiculous in comparison to his great power to keep you forever. Not only your physical body and your soul, but everything about you, everything that you need and think and desire, everything that is essential to who you are. When you let your ego fall carelessly to the ground, or rather, into the pieced hands of the risen Christ, it’s not like he breezily forgets you. Actually. He payed in blood for that ego. He gave up everything he had. He isn’t going to forget you and wander away. He isn’t disorganized, lazy, selfish, worried. He has the ability to hang on to you and to keep you forever.

Whoever, he says. Whoever would lose his life for my sake, will find it. You let go of yourself, not knowing or seeing how it’s going to turn out. You are walking along through your life with the lights off, not able to keep a hold of everything that you wish you could keep a hold of, not able to have it together, worried perhaps, anxious maybe, wearing a protective coat of anger and organization. But no matter how hard you cling to yourself, in the end, if you don’t let yourself fall into the care of Jesus, you will lose everything, yourself included. Only he can hang on to you forever. You, who did not have the power to die, neither have the power to live.

It is impossible, for me, to live and to die. But with Jesus, even this thing is possible.