Are you saving or serving your life?

Mark 8:34-9:1

Jesus called the people and his disciples to him and said, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. What gain, then, is it for a man to win the whole world and ruin his life? And indeed what can a man offer in exchange for his life? For if anyone in this adulterous and sinful generation is ashamed of me and of my words, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’ And he said to them, ‘I tell you solemnly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.’

Food for thought!

Jesus said (and says) to his disciples that things get worse before they get better; suffering comes before victory; victory comes after a fight; crown comes after a cross; Easter Sunday comes after Good Friday; daytime comes after night. He knows that this law applies to him as well; he is no exception: he will suffer grievously, be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be put to death, before we he is raised up on the third day. Jesus is talking of himself, yes, but also he is talking of every human, like you and me.

This is why Jesus exhorts us to take our cross, our struggle, our fight and our challenges every day and  move on, because this is the way we can ever make a difference in the world. Here Jesus lays down the laws of life. “Life is a place of service and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.” — Leo Tolstoy

He says that we must deny ourselves. What does that mean? A great scholar comes at the meaning in this way. Peter once denied his Lord. That is to say, he said of Jesus, "I do not know the man." To deny ourselves is therefore to say, "I do not know myself." It is to go beyond the self, to go beyond the immediate; it is to reach out to others; is to forget about self, and put our whole heart into someone or something greater.

Jesus says that we must take up our cross. What does that mean? To take up our cross means to be prepared to face things; it means to be ready to endure the worst that man can do to us for the sake of being true to a cause. Do you have any worthy cause you live for? Do you find life worth living? And what, at the end of the day, can make life really worth living unless there is something— a cause, a love, a person— worth dying for? Remember Viktor E. Frankl's lament, "people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning."

Jesus says that we must spend our life, not hoard it. The whole gamut of the world's standards must be changed. The questions are not, "How much can I get out of life?" but, "How much can I give to life?" Not, "What is the safe thing to do?" but, "What is the right thing to do?" Not, "What is the minimum permissible I must do?" but, "What is the maximum possible contribution that I must make in life?" The Christian must realize that meaning is found beyond and not within oneself. What we need is to discover the meaning in our life, to find someone or something to live for. "He who has a why to live can endure almost any how." (Nietzsche)