Meditation for the Sunday After the Exaltation of the Precious Cross
Mark 8:34 – 9:1
“Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it”
In this Gospel passage the word “life” (or “soul”) comes up several times. Once we hear Jesus asking us to lose it, and another time to save it.
We need to pay enough attention to tell apart the two meanings this word carries in this passage. The Lord Jesus makes this difference clear as he goes on explaining, so as to convey his deep command to us. It is clear that in each image in these verses the Lord is speaking of the two opposite meanings of the soul: the soul we must deny and lose, which is ashamed of him; and the other soul that we must save by carrying the cross, which is worth more than the whole world, for which there is no ransom, which bears witness to Christ and which he will remember in the glory of his Father.
“The soul”, in the first sense Jesus means, the one he asks us to lose, means “looking after ourselves”: it means self-interest, private property, getting rich by piling up money for ourselves, satisfying desires and indulging passions, and so on… in other words, trying to secure “what is ours” while forgetting what belongs to Jesus and to others. And clearly the soul he asks us to save is our very self and our true life, which the whole world, even if we owned it, would not be worth.
So we must distinguish between what belongs to us and what we are. There are many philosophies, and each gives a different definition of existence. The first says: “I think, therefore I am.” And the philosophy of our age, the philosophy of consumption, says: “I own, therefore I am.” I have health, so I exist, because illness is a kind of nothingness and non-being. I have money, so I am powerful and I exist, because poverty is nothingness, oblivion and being erased from existence.
I have children? Then I go on existing. I have a social position? Then I exist. So, to gain existence I have to run after securing these basics. People today fight nothingness with an abundance of possessions and feel secure in the size of their barns and in plenty of health and glory. Existence is life, and securing the soul means guaranteeing it existence “through possessions”. It is this consumerist philosophy that says in the Gospel, “Soul, rejoice, you have ample goods laid up for many years”; but the Lord showed it to be the philosophy of a fool. The Gospel is clear: “the soul” is not fulfilled by securing “what belongs to the soul”.
Our self is not a possession, and “I” is not the same as “mine”.
“What is mine” is the life insurance of the person who tries to look after and save himself, even at the expense of “what he is”. So he runs to gain the world for himself, because by owning the world he thinks he is securing himself. He sells himself as ransom for it, and he is ashamed of the Lord’s words and of the faith in this adulterous and sinful generation, in order to win for himself glory, position, money or advantage, and to add to what is his.
“What I am” is the philosophy of the person who has loved Jesus and knows that he is “the son”, not the trader; the heir, not the hired worker.
“What I am” is the faith of the Christian who renounces any interest, any money, “what is his” or the whole world, in order to gain his true self and identity, and not lose his identity to buy possessions.
A father, for example, who sends his son out to work too early is selling him: he has gained money but lost what makes him who he is, “being a father”.
A mother who sells her daughter to gain something else for herself has gained something of the world but lost herself, “being a mother”.
A politician who buys and sells at the expense of principle gains for himself but loses himself. An ambassador who, in a foreign land, buys and sells as if he belonged to that foreign world, building himself a house in a land he will leave, gains things for himself only to lose himself.
A person is measured by “what he is”, not by “what he has”. A person’s self is not the same as what belongs to him.
The second meaning of the soul, then, is “what I am”, and this is the philosophy of the Christian who has believed in the wisdom of serpents. The wisdom of serpents, as Saint John Chrysostom explains it, is not about protecting what is one’s own. Some think the serpent is wary, letting no one touch it or get at it, quick to defend itself and nimble in looking after its interests. For Chrysostom, the wisdom of serpents lies in the fact that the serpent knows where its life really is; so when you strike it, it gives you its whole body and hides its head.
So the Christian is like a wise merchant sailing with his goods through a world of rough seas. When he has to save himself because the waves of life are raging, he throws all his cargo into the sea so that he himself may survive in the ship. What good is it for a man to carry the whole world in his trade and lose his life at sea? What good is it for a man to secure everything that is his and lose himself?
The Gospel makes it quite clear that I exist not when I own things or when I think, but when I carry the cross and renounce what is mine, and do not seek worldly gain if it forces me to be ashamed of Christ. “I exist when I follow Jesus.” This is, if we may put it so, Christian existential philosophy.
“I am the one who follows Jesus”? This is the only guarantee of my life: to be his faithful witness always and his ambassador wherever I am; to renounce self-interest, because I have no interest in it; to renounce possessions, because for the journey they are only weights. For me the world is a field for preaching the Gospel, not for investment. My life’s guarantee is the cross, not crooked paths; and for my identity, “my soul”, there is no ransom.
Yes, whoever wants to save (his soul) “through what is his” will lose it, and whoever loses what is his (his soul) for the sake of Christ and the Gospel will save it. Amen.
