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Finding ourselves by losing ourselves
Sunday May 25 2008
This morning I preached in a Methodist Church at Burrington, north Devon. I concluded my sermon by saying that at the heart of Christianity is the paradox that we find ourselves by losing ourselves; we discover our true selves by giving ourselves away in self-denial.
If this paradox is at the heart of the Christian faith, then it may be a clue to the nature of ultimate reality.
The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote strikingly that, ´When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.´ The central emblem of the Christian faith, the cross, speaks not only of something Christ has done for us: it is also a symbol of death to self.
But alongside the Lord’s call to self-denial is his assurance about self-affirmation (if you lose your life you find it). He spoke of the value of human beings in God’s sight. They are much more valuable than birds and animals. I know that this week´s New Scientist attempts unsuccessfully to refute the idea that humans are unique but Jesus does seem to have held that human beings are the crown of God’s creative activity and that he made male and female in his own image. It is the divine image we bear which gives us our distinctive value. As one young American black, rebelling against inferiority feelings inculcated in him by whites, is reported to have inscribed on a banner in his room: ´I’m me and I’m good, ’cause God don’t make junk.´
But how can we value ourselves and deny ourselves simultaneously? The answer is that our ´Self´ is a complex mixture of good and evil, glory and shame. The Self we are to deny, disown and crucify is what Christians think of as the fallen self, everything in us which is incompatible with Jesus (hence his command to deny yourself and then follow him).
The Self we are to affirm and value is our created self, everything within us which is compatible with Jesus (hence his assurance that if we lose ourselves by self-denial we shall find ourselves). True self-denial (the denial of our false fallen self) isn’t the road to self-destruction but the road to self-discovery.
Whatever we are by creation we affirm: our rationality and sense of moral obligation. What we are by the Fall we deny or repudiate: our irrationality and moral perversity.
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