For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.
Matthew 16:25 NIVUK
Anyone who has travelled anywhere outside their own country will be very familiar with the concept of a currency exchange. You go there with currency from one country. You give them this currency. They change it to another currency and charge you a small commission – although some currency exchanges charge more then others.
Pretty straightforward, right?
Except if you come from the Isle of Man, Gibraltar or Scotland.
Why, you might ask?
Well, our banks issue British pounds, just like the Bank of England. However, despite our pounds being the same currency as English pounds, they are not as widely recognised overseas. Some people think our money is fake, or pretend, like from a board game. Others recognise it, but their banks won’t pay the same rate for it, so we get a worse deal when we exchange it than when we exchange English pounds.
Which leads us to the rather unfortunate situation where we have to change our perfectly valid and legal tender money to the money of another country to be able to spend it.
I’m sure you can imagine how we feel about that!
Jesus here talks about three exchanges, where something of lesser value can be changed up for something of greater value. However, very many people in our world completely miss this and are left with a painfully cheap imitation of life instead of the real thing.
The first exchange is about keeping and losing our life.
However, before we do that, we need to understand what it is that Jesus is talking about here. The word translated as both ‘life’ and ‘soul’ in this verse and the next is precisely the same: the word psyché. This word has two meanings: one is the breath or life force that animates us and makes us alive, and the other is the sum total of our emotions, desires, affections and aversions – our psyche. It’s from this world that we derive terms like ‘psychology’, ‘psychometric’, ‘psychopath’, and so on.
I believe both translations are correct. They simply refer to two states of being: one before physical death, the other after.
And I believe that here Jesus is saying something quite startling and incredibly challenging.
We read this in John’s Gospel as a reaction to culturally and ethnically Greeks seeking to meet with Jesus:
Jesus replied, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honour the one who serves me.
John 12:23-26 NIVUK
What He meant by this was that for His message to spread and reproduce He had to surrender His life. This is, of course, exactly what He did.
And this is what He is demanding of His followers.
You see, the context of our verses in Matthew is both a declaration of who Jesus is (Matthew 16:13-20) and a very tough rebuke (Matthew 16:21-23). And the reason for the tough rebuke is that Peter’s – and Jesus’s disciples' – idea of what a Messiah should be and do was completely the opposite of who Jesus was. They longed for a Messiah who would lead the Jews in rebellion, defeat the Romans and bring in a kind of utopian heaven-on-earth. The very fact that the Messiah would die at the hands of pagans was completely unacceptable.
It also contradicted one of the main reasons why anyone would follow a Messiah. They were His inner circle. Surely they would receive earthly fame and power and glory, not to mention wealth, for following Him. This is why Peter and his brothers got their mother to ask Jesus if they could sit at His left and right in His Kingdom (Matthew 20:20-28). It also explains the constant, and often completely inappropriate, arguments about who was the greatest (Mark 9:34; Luke 22:24, for example).
So what the disciples were seeking were blessings and wealth and honour on earth.
What they got was completely the opposite:
To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world – right up to this moment.
1 Corinthians 4:11-13 NIVUK
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.
2 Corinthians 4:8-11 NIVUK
They would get none of those blessings that their contemporaries imagined that followers of the Messiah would get. One of them committed suicide after betraying Jesus, ten were slain by the Jewish leaders and the Romans, one died in exile.
So how does this verse apply to us?
After all, most of us will not face martyrdom as they did.
Jesus is very clear that those who follow Him will face a death of some sorts, as we saw before. We know that this death is the death of our sinful self. But often more things than that need to die.
You see, we see these very challenging words in Romans 12:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:1-2 NIVUK
In other words, accepting that Jesus is Lord and being a living sacrifice means that we have relinquished control over our life – Jesus is now in charge. That it what it means by definition for Him to be our Lord. And if He truly is Lord, and we are holding nothing back, then He can do what He wants with us.
We are basically giving Him permission to lead us wherever He wants and ask anything of us.
What this effectively means is that we can no longer cling tightly to any aspect at all of our lives. The greatest expression of this, I believe, is the oldest, when Job, who has lost almost everything and everyone precious to him, says these words:
At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.’ In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.
Job 1:20-22 NIVUK
Making Jesus Lord and Sovereign of our loves means that we give Him the right to give – yes, absolutely – but also to take away.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt when He does it. Of course it does. It just means that we submit to His Lordship and the goodness of His plan when He does (Romans 8:28).
What Jesus is saying is that if we cling tightly to our lives and try to defend everything we are and have, then we will lose it anyway. Jesus Himself spoke of this concept on several occasions: the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12: 13-20); the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31); His teaching on money (Matthew 6:22-24; Luke 16:13-15).
Yet many have not learned this lesson. They might mock the paranoia of Doomsday Preppers in the United States, who are suspicious of everything and stockpile food and weapons in their basement, but the way they defend their taste in music, orders of service, traditions, theologies, mindsets, cultures and even Bible versions is not all that different.
Jesus is saying that if we are willing to hold loosely to everything in life, but tightly to Him, then we will truly be alive. But if we cling tightly to anything but Him, then we will lose everything.
Have you ever seen a young child playing on the beach? Have you seen the way they grasp at the sand or the seawater? What happens when they do this? Does it not disappear through their tightly clenched fingers?
Jesus is saying here that life does exactly the same thing. The more we grasp onto it, the more it escapes us.
But if we entrust it to Him completely, then we are truly alive.
Questions
1. Why does Jesus teach His disciples that those who cling on to life will lose it? What mentality is He seeking to change?
2. How to we ‘cling on to life’? Is this a good or a bad thing?
3. How can we live our lives as living sacrifices? What do we need to do or not do?
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