34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,[i] will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
- Bible, Hebrew and Greek words for the outcome of accepting the gospel include salvation, immortality, resurrection, life, eternal life, and everlasting life.
- Death: Looking up these words in Merriam-Webster online, we see that they all - in one way or another - indicate an overcoming of the barriers of space and time as well as death and its presentments or precursors.
- Freedom from Death a Universal Desire: The desire for salvation from bondage to death (or Death, when personified) is universal. Every creature wishes to be saved understood in a manner appropriate to its nature. Microbes, bugs, dogs and humans all share the desire to be saved from death (either as individuals and as species) though that desire is expressed and acted upon and imagined (in the case of humans) in vastly different ways. Salvation is in the eye of the beholder.
- Salvation in the Eye of the Beholder: In the case of humans, how one conceptualizes salvation (including using a different word to conceptualize it!) depends on the particular aspect of death from which one feels the need to be saved. For a sinner, salvation is forgiveness. For a sick and suffering person it is health and wholeness in mind and body. For the teacher it is knowledge. For the engineer it is the technical solution to a human problem. To an atheist, it is freedom from religious beliefs and practices they feel forced on them by family, friends and society. But we all want to be saved from something.
- Salvation Through God in Christ: The Bible and the Christian tradition indicates that salvation occurs through encountering, sharing and responding to the good news (gospel) of God in Christ: a salvation that transcends time and space such that it is appropriate for me to say I was saved, I am saved, I am in the process of being saved, and I will be saved - and all are true.
- Ironic Salvation: Christian salvation is as ironic as one might expect from a salvation whose central symbol is an impoverished peasant under military occupation being tortured to death: one gains their life by losing it, one overcomes death by resisting but ultimately succumb to it. As Princess Leia said in a different context, “This is some rescue.”
Quotes:
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
* * *
Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called.
Dictionary Resources:
Biblical Resources;
The Rich Man (eternal life)
The Righteous Judgment of God (immortality, eternal life)
The Servant’s Mission (salvation)
The Resurrection of the Dead (everlasting life)
The Question About The Resurrection (resurrection)
1 comment:
Just printed this to read at airport tomorrow morning. Fought the urge to quickly devour your writing before bed.
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