Bonhoeffer writes that when Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die. But what does that dying look like?
When I first became a Christian, death looked like leaving my family behind. Wrestling, night after night with whether I could trust a God my family didn’t believe. For months, I refused to do it. I love them – and where they went, I followed. But Christ’s call was to follow Him and not them. And I had to make a decision; just as they have to make theirs.
That was a big choice. And over the years there have been others. The way I live. How I use my resources – my body, my mind, my time. Turning points, where following Jesus has felt like choosing death. Dates chiseled in my timeline. Moments I’ll never forget.
But for the most part, the dying isn’t in the big events or the mammoth choices. It’s small and constant. Every day I wake up and think I’m ok. Every day I try and go it alone. I have to die afresh – to my own resources, to my own efforts, to my own wisdom. I look at these things: independence, strength, my sense of self. I feel their loss. And I realise, with a jolt – they were already dead.
Jesus chose the path of self-abnegation or dying love for you. Quite what he saved oursleves from we may never know. We were saved, i hope from the ultimate anguish he submitted himself to , on our behalf. I can hear it from the pastor, ‘what a wonderful saviour!’ If we live by the fruit of his life is it any wonder we are not totally in awe of him…?.We dont know how far we had fallen, presumably. Having said that, when i hear ‘crazy Christians’ who are presumably not quite ‘sorted’, say they want to go to do missionary work in say, Tibet, then they appear to have internalised the idea that we are to move at short notice if called. Thankfully as one who would be challenged by shorter journeys than that one, gladly i have not heard such a call. In the meantime, i die to the tendency to navel-gaze. I die to the tendency to think me big or of any worldly significance. Better to think that one has no part to play than to imagine that one is indispensible! I thought we all lived by the unquestionable foundations of meekness and humility in the face of one so much greater than ourselves?!