follow the leader, part 4 (luke 9:23-27)

Jesus’ demands of renunciation of self and daily death is followed by a weird explanation: “For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that one will find it.” It’s back-to-front logic, humanly speaking. Wanting to hold onto life means death; although he doesn’t actually say that, he says, “losing life” which is contrasted with the next part of the sentence which says that to lose your life for his sake will mean that you actually find your life.

So, is he intimating that hanging onto your life has the effect of ruining your very self – a kind of living death? I sometimes think that so many people around the world are trapped in a living death. And the real tragedy is that they don’t know any different, although I suspect that many of them have an inkling that something is wrong. A bit like in the movie, The Matrix, when Morpheus says to Neo that Neo knows there is something wrong but he doesn’t know what it is. It’s like a splinter in his mind, driving him mad. How many people in the world are slowly being driven mad by that splinter, the splinter that says something is wrong but they don’t know what it is, nor how to remove the splinter. So all they can do is numb the pain, and the methods of numbing are as numerous and varied as there are people. And to try to list them would be tedious.

On the other hand, losing your life for Jesus’ sake means finding it – or, saving it, as he says. Losing your life for Jesus seems to be about voluntarily renouncing yourself in favour of embracing the horrible death and humiliation of the cross. How does that work then?

Tags: jesus, contemplative, messiah