We are doing the Alpha course at my church. Alpha is a 10-week introduction to Christian faith and practice, meeting weekly over dinner with a talk and discussion. The first week looks at “Who is Jesus?” The second we jump right into “Why Did Jesus Die?” There are many answers to such a question, depending on which of the four canonical gospels you’re reading and where you sit on the theological spectrum.
There are also no answers to so deep and unsettling a mystery. Did humans operating out of sin and evil kill Jesus? Did God have his own son killed? Was Jesus’ death due to politics, paranoia, personal feuds? Could it have been prevented? Was it simply the inevitable consequence of human choice, or a divine plan?
Perhaps a combination of all of these. Jesus predicted his arrest, death and resurrection often enough that it seems to have been a plan he was enacting. Yet that plan required human beings to make choices that could have gone in other ways. And any notion that Jesus was a passive victim of either human or divine operation is contested by these words attributed to Jesus as he talks about being the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep:
For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”
Laying things down, things that we call life, is a constant effort in the life of a Christ-follower. Jesus demonstrated a self-giving love that offered everything, including his life. Where are we called to sacrifice our comfort or convenience or resources so someone else might have more room to live?
I was in a conversation yesterday about racial reconciliation, and someone said it’s not enough for those of us born into privilege to say we’re sorry for the historic and current injustice that limits access to the wealth and security we enjoy; we may actually need to get up and out of the chair, to make space for someone who hasn’t had our advantages. That’s a way of laying down of our lives at a high level. There are also smaller scale choices we can make – to lay down our insistence on being right, or knowing better, or having more. What comes to mind for you?
It is our privilege to make a choice to yield our privilege. Like Jesus, we have power to lay down our lives and to take them up again. In fact, when we lay them down, we truly find a richer life to take up. As we lay down those things that we cling to so tightly, we make room for God’s life to expand in us. As we give our life away, we find ourselves in that abundant life Jesus promised.
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