Wednesday
Wednesday
Finding Ourselves
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.
Mark 8:35
Because this verse speaks of saving and losing our life, I used to think that it referred specifically to Christian martyrs who in dying for Christ would enter eternal life. But, although the verse may well include a reference to martyrdom, I now see that Jesus had a much wider application in mind than that. The language indicates this. The word translated “life” is psuch
, meaning “soul” or “self.” Indeed, Luke renders Jesus’s statement with the simple reflexive: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?” (Luke 9:25).
One might perhaps paraphrase Jesus’s favorite epigram, which he seems to have used in several different contexts, in this way: “If you insist on holding on to yourself, and refuse to let yourself go, but determine to live for yourself, you will lose yourself. That is the way of death, not the way of life. But if you are willing to lose yourself, to give yourself away in love, in the service of the gospel, then in the moment of complete abandon, when you think you have lost everything, the miracle takes place and you find yourself.”
In recent years several schools of psychology have developed that lay their emphasis on self-actualization. The word sounds promising in Christian ears until we remember that, according to Jesus, the only way to self-discovery is self-denial, and the only way to live is to die to our own self-centeredness.
In two similar epigrams Jesus used commercial language, the language of profit, loss, and exchange. He asked two rhetorical questions, which remained unanswered. Firstly, what profit would there be in gaining the whole world (all the wealth, power, and fame it offers) and losing oneself? Secondly, what could anyone give in exchange for himself? Both questions emphasize the infinite value of the self in contrast to the value of the world. For one thing, it is impossible to gain the whole world. For another, if one could, it would not last, and while it did last, it would not satisfy.
For further reading: Luke 12:13–21