The living is in the dying
“Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.” (Luke 17:33)
For two thousand years the Bible has stood sentry over suffering in the lives of Christians. It has told us that those who lose their lives for the sake of the Kingdom of God will gain their lives in its coming. That's not a statement one can make easily. It isn't easily embroidered on a pillow; instead it is more like scar tissue on the human heart. As we suffer, as pain is endured, what will become of us? Can our hearts continue when it is the work of living that kills us? The dying is in the living or the living is in the dying; it's a puzzle we can only assemble at the edges. So much remains unsolved: what is this losing like? How long will the losing continue? How far will God allow the losing to progress in our lives, how much of our hearts consumed, before he comes back or we die in the process? These are the deep questions for Christian discipleship; if you thought the questions were easier or sunnier, it isn't Christianity you're following but a brand of religious living. For Jesus followers suffering is on brand. Weakness is on brand. Losing is on brand.
“These are the deep questions for Christian discipleship; if you thought the questions were easier or sunnier, it isn’t Christianity you’re following”
Jesus means for us to lose our lives in the unspectacular, typical, everyday sense: to choose to not live a self-centered and self-focused life. To be at the service of the world around us, the world that demands your life. Your life is to be the center of blessing and of good-news; the bread of life set out for a starving world will be torn to pieces.
There's another losing that looks like long-term faithfulness with a stitch in its side, or a thorn. J.I. Packer talked about it this way, "To live with your ‘thorn’ uncomplainingly — that is, sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel weak — is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.” That is the victory that develops from our sort of defeat. This kind of humble living is not easily adapted from typical values of safety, comfort, and control. To lose is to lose the upper hand in favor of a humble heart.
““To live with your ‘thorn’ uncomplainingly — that is, sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel weak — is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.””
— J.I. Packer
There's also a sort of losing that involves looking to the Christ at the horizon from your place of suffering. This is a daily discipline. Read the psalms; orient yourself to the rhythm of grief appended by hope. The text here in Luke 17 is not a voice we can relegate to the margins of Christian experience. It cannot be only for some, and it cannot find its place beyond the bookends of practical Christian living. It needs to be front and center, or else suffering is not only a kind of blindness but a deafness, too. The Christians who seek to live on without sight or sound will hurt themselves and anyone else in their path.
Living is in the dying, the sixth-grader says as they endure ridicule for voicing an unpopular love for an unpopular friend. The faithful spouse says under their breath on the morning commute, weeks after being left by an unfaithful spouse. Or the man who sets his first appointment with a therapist to dig into the story that has been crushing him by depressing degrees, year after year. And the one who prays through gritted teeth not only for an enemy's defeat but an enemy's joy. We must hear from God that the living is in the dying because God knows there is only so much we can give, only so much we can love, before we find ourselves on our faces. The puzzle we've been struggling to assemble at the edges has a clear center: what's lost in Christ, is found. We know the heartbreaks and have lived them, we know the losses because we once had what was lost. At the heart of Jesus' message is that we can count on it: the bereft by faith will one day rejoice.