The world needs us to lose our lives in God.
The teaching on losing one’s life is one of Jesus’ hard sayings. He has a lot of them. I hear this Gospel and scratch my head in confusion because life is hard enough. I’m just trying to get through the day with shuffling children to my nanny, doing my best at work, eating as healthy as possible, and getting just enough time to watch a TV show before passing out on the couch. Many families are doing their best to make ends meet, to put food on the table. Then, there’s all the psychological problems we face such as depression, narcissism, and schizophrenia. Even worse, there’s all the violence happening in the world right now.
I don’t think Jesus dismisses any of these experiences. Rather, he invites us to lose our lives right in the middle of them. He doesn’t ask us to cut ourselves off from our everyday lives. He asks us to cut out the ego. Jesus calls us to live without ego and for God. The ego is the identity we cling to in the face of feeling so alienated and cut off from all things. Because of this deep sense of separation, the ego wants a comfortable life, one in which it has control and security. To distract from the painful emptiness of feeling disconnected the ego turns its attention to television, movies, relationships, fashion, sports, video games, comic books, shopping, food, and whatever else our culture serves up so the ego can feel better about itself. Meanwhile, our consumer lifestyle is hurting the earth, the poor, and, ultimately, ourselves. Jesus’ teaching on losing one’s life is needed now more than ever. There’s no solution to global warming, to racial injustice, or to economic oppression without this fundamental Gospel injunction: lose your life.
Losing one’s life is not a lofty prescription. It’s a simple matter of attention. We stop paying attention to ourselves and pay attention to God. We stop paying attention to ourselves and pay attention to others. It is an interior state of mind in which one turns away from self-centeredness and concerns for self-gratification, self-preservation, and self-promotion. One turns towards God and towards the neighbor, especially the poor. This inner state is the state of emptiness or nothingness. It is the most direct path to enlightenment and unity with God. St. John of the Cross writes that one gets to the summit of the mountain, unity with God, by a path of “nothingness.”
Sometimes losing one’s life means to continue praying or going to Mass even when it’s boring and one “gets nothing out of it.” The point of prayer and the sacraments is not to get a message or take something home with you, but to allow God’s life to flood your own. This attitude of needing to get something out of every experience is an ego trip because it makes the Mass, prayer, or whatever else we experience about the ego, about me. It’s an attitude symptomatic of our consumer culture.
Losing one’s life is like a curse to our consumer culture, which works on the assumption of self-interest. The political world, too, reinforces this notion of people only working out of self-interest. While it may be true, there is more to being human than self-interest. Jesus shows us this. He dies on the cross out of selflessness. Jesus loses his life, and God raises him up. This is the way to freedom and happiness. Meister Eckhart says it so well. He writes, “Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. Truly, if you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be.” If we feel disturbed, it is because of our ego. This feeling of disturbance stems from making our ego the center of the universe when the only center is God.
Jesus tells us to lose our lives in a section of Matthew’s Gospel called the missionary discourse, which is a block of teachings Jesus gives the disciples as he sends them into the world to preach the Gospel and live the faith. They can do this only if God is number one in their lives, hence Jesus says that whoever loves their father, mother, daughter, or son more than him is not “worthy of him.” He is telling us to let God be God, and have no other gods besides, even if they are good things like family. Letting God be God, beyond our egos and beyond our private world of priorities, is essential to losing our lives. In fact, it is our major spiritual practice, day in and day out. It is the most direct path to enlightenment. It is vital to the flourishing of justice and peace in our world. It is a non-negotiable if we want to protect the environment. To lose our lives is to be selfless; it is to be Jesus in the world.