Laying Down to Live Part 1
We have fully stepped onto the path of the final week of Jesus’s life, traditionally known as Jesus’s Passion or Passion week. The story that unfolds has such depth and power within it, but we mustn’t forget that the depth and weight of this week is found in the life that walked into this week.
Jesus revealed who the Divine is through the life he lived, not just in his death. Too many presentations of “the Gospel” are absent of the life of Jesus, as it immediately jumps to the death and resurrection. And that is tragic.
Without Incarnation we cannot arrive at Resurrection.
We first encounter, enter into, and participate in the life of Jesus, and then we join him in the element of death and resurrection to new life. And this isn’t just the end of the story, it is weaved all throughout the story. We are constantly awakening to that which is but a single step, a beginning, one seed in the hand of our life. Which guides in learning that laying down of the selfish and shortsighted, which is the planting of the single seed into the ground, creates a way for the expansive move from single seed to abundant orchard.
Which takes us to one of the last conversations Jesus had with his students, who he now calls friends.
“This is My commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: that he lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:12-13)
I encourage you to read that overt a couple times… slowly. Many have described dying for others as the greatest act of love. But the text says to lay down one’s life, which very well may include dying, but it begins with what one does with this one life we have, correct?
Sure, we love the movies where the hero dies for the village, team or world. But at this point in Jesus’s life, he has simply given his entire way of life for the transforming of all who follow him. Jesus took his one life and lived it as a way of revealing, empowering, and encouraging a new way to be in the world. He didn’t live his one life for a sizable house, a cottage get away replete with a boat on the lake, and a chunky 401k.
No, I don’t think those things are necessarily bad or the enemy, but when they are the goal or gold standard, then they most certainly are in the way.
I don’t recall the prayer being, “Give us this day our 401k…” correct?
Way before Jesus is killed, he lays down his life… for all…in love.
And that’s what he invites his students, his friends, to do as well. Don’t simply die for others, but lay down your life for others, in love.
How many times have we heard that someone is willing to die for the one they love, or even kill for them? It plays well as a romanticized line on a card, in a movie, or the marketing mantra for the military, but I’d argue that laying down one’s life has an even greater depth to it.
It’s not about puffing up one’s chest, but rather humbly laying down my rights for our wholeness. It’s counterintuitive and countercultural, to be sure. It subverts the coercive way of empire and macho might, which is maddening and frustrating to the institutional powers that be.
The way of Jesus is the laying down of life, which comes well before any sacrificial death.
