Thursday after Ash Wednesday – Feb. 18, 2010
Luke 9:22 – 25
And he said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."
Then he said to them all: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for you to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit your very self?”
There are plenty of people for whom “discipline” and “denial” are dirty words. The words reinforce stereotypes held by many non-Christians about what it means to follow Jesus. And many Christians feel intimidated because the words suggest difficulty and that which is unattainable.
Yet Jesus says that those who follow and learn from him (disciples) must “deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow.”
To be sure, words like “acquisition” and “accumulation” would be friendlier to modern ears. Westerners have made a cottage industry out of having more and doing better. In every aspect of our lives we live by unspoken creeds that suggest life is about acquiring more, adding more trophies to the trophy case.
Even in our experience of the Christian faith we are consumers . . . more knowledge, more serving, more information, more belief.
The spiritual journey, on the other hand, invites us to let go, release, and surrender. In Jesus’ vocabulary, it is about “denial.” In modern language, think of it as subtraction.
Typically we think that progress in the spiritual life depends on gathering more information, going to more worship services, saying more prayers, accumulating more spiritual practices. In other words, we think in terms of addition.
The spiritual life invites us to subtraction, to let go of illusions about ourselves, to release our egotistical control on life, to “become less” (of our illusory false self) in order to “become more” the person God created us to be.
The “life” that Jesus invites us to lose is the life that revolves around self, propped up by images and masks. The “life” that Jesus wants to “save” or reclaim is the life hidden within us, the God-treasure already seeded deep inside each of us.
And he said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."
Then he said to them all: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for you to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit your very self?”
There are plenty of people for whom “discipline” and “denial” are dirty words. The words reinforce stereotypes held by many non-Christians about what it means to follow Jesus. And many Christians feel intimidated because the words suggest difficulty and that which is unattainable.
Yet Jesus says that those who follow and learn from him (disciples) must “deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow.”
To be sure, words like “acquisition” and “accumulation” would be friendlier to modern ears. Westerners have made a cottage industry out of having more and doing better. In every aspect of our lives we live by unspoken creeds that suggest life is about acquiring more, adding more trophies to the trophy case.
Even in our experience of the Christian faith we are consumers . . . more knowledge, more serving, more information, more belief.
The spiritual journey, on the other hand, invites us to let go, release, and surrender. In Jesus’ vocabulary, it is about “denial.” In modern language, think of it as subtraction.
Typically we think that progress in the spiritual life depends on gathering more information, going to more worship services, saying more prayers, accumulating more spiritual practices. In other words, we think in terms of addition.
The spiritual life invites us to subtraction, to let go of illusions about ourselves, to release our egotistical control on life, to “become less” (of our illusory false self) in order to “become more” the person God created us to be.
The “life” that Jesus invites us to lose is the life that revolves around self, propped up by images and masks. The “life” that Jesus wants to “save” or reclaim is the life hidden within us, the God-treasure already seeded deep inside each of us.
Comments
Post a Comment