What We are to Give Up

There is a crucial aspect of "giving up one's life" in accordance with Jesus' admonitions that must be understood if we are to conceptualize rightly what that "giving up" portends for our lives "in the world."  This is touched upon by a teaching of Jesus that is often mischaracterized (if understood at all, in that its application seems foreign to much of our experiences.)  This teaching is in Chapter 14 of Luke, in a section titled bizarrely by the Ryrie Study Bible as "Concerning indulgent people":

"For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?  Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him.  Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.  Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?  Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.  So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:28-33, KJV)

A reasonable observer, granting the prudence of Jesus' warnings against the hypothetical characters' possible presumption, might nonetheless wonder what those examples have to do with "whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple"?  Are not the characters being found correct in that they would take prudent measures to conserve what they have, either their dignity or their kingly stature?  What does that have to do with forsaking all?

It might be tempting, in service to conventional Christianity, to contend that Jesus' examples of the tower-builder and the king are meant to describe a person's wise estimation that no resources they possess might secure their salvation--the whole "salvation by faith (or grace) alone," "cast everything upon Christ" routine.  The problem with this is found in the very text, which prefaces the passage above with the immediately preceding:

"And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple."  Clearly, Jesus is describing in these passages what is involved in "giving up one's life"--not describing some initial (or periodic) calculus on the part of the believer, but describing rather the very conditions of understanding properly the believer's relationship to "life" and to "the world."  Inasmuch as Jesus is depicting the tower-builder and the king as contemplating the unknowns of life's potentialities, the logical conclusion here is that Jesus is telling us that the "world" that we are giving up does not really exist--what we are giving up is our set of understandings and anticipations about our existences.

To a person who adheres to Jesus' demand to "give up one's life," that "life" is not merely to be set aside--as it were--into some compartment of conceptualizations.  It should need scarcely to be observed how two thousand years of Christianity have seen the goods and the snares of the world frantically embraced by supposed believers who have "given all" to Christ--and then have stuffed the vessels of their lives that they have labeled "His" with all manner of worldly goods and worldly bad.

To a person who adheres to Jesus' demand to "give up one's life," that "life" is something that has no existence other than in the mortal's lamentable attachments.  The same is to be said of the mortal's "world"--as additionally it might be said that the ultimate implication of the idea that God is the master of the world is the final, ungraspable conclusion that either God exists essentially, or the world does.  Either Jesus exists as everything he claims to be, or our lives exist.  Either Jesus exists, or the world against which he warns us exists--because we are attached to the notion that it exists.  If we were true believers as Jesus demands, we could walk over the water of oceans or walk through the stone of mountains--the "existence" of the world in anything but an infinitely malleable sense would be nonsense.

If we reckon that our lives and our worlds consist of unknowns--not an imprudent reckoning even by the standards of the world--then asking God for guidance and positive outcomes is not really praying, since we are asking God to oppose himself in our favor against a set of conditions.  The God of that manner of petition is not the God of Jesus--the God of Jesus is a being in contrast to whom everything else is nothing, not a pathetic collection of little things.  A god who is bigger or stronger than little things is an humongous idol, not the God of Jesus.

The God of Jesus has foreseen and provided for every possible permutation of Creation, and in this Creation Jesus teaches us that true belief--even including, as striking as it sounds, humble piety--is displayed in an attitude toward the world as an essential non-entity, serving merely as the conceptual space in which anything can happen, any "law" of "nature" can be broken, and any dimension can be defied.  Thus we are confronted by exasperating, shimmering conceptions of Elijah--chimeric, protean, what-have-you--yet entirely consonant with Jesus' unconcern with any mortal conception of the possible. 

Accordingly, Jesus teaches us that even our human petitions--presuming most awesomely on our incomprehensible status as the children of God, yet anticipated by a merciful Father--are sufficient as opposed to the conditions of the world.  That we do not get positive answers to our petitions shows merely that we have failed in our smallish duties in a smallish world--none of this has to do with a proper perception of the world existing at all in the framework of our aspirational consideration of God.

God has often enough repented of the very existence of human lives and of the creaturely world--the ancient (one might say primordial) belief system espoused by Jesus tells us as much.  What has survived, by God's indulgence, has been squeezed and wrung through unfathomable contortions.  What has survived might be called wreckage, though even that would be too much, since "wreckage" presumes some resemblance to that which stood originally.  We cannot, in our present state, get our minds around whatever existed originally.

The belief system of Jesus echoes a primordial state in which Adam needed no one but God--or at least was cast forth into existence with that rarefied potentiality.  Humanity foundered at a point before our species' first reckoning of it, and even an infinitude of preceding epochs or of preceding permutations of Creation would be incomprehensible to us, tethered as we are to what we call "the world."  We are "lives" in "the world" in which God concluded that "it is not good that the man should be alone"--and all of humanity has suffered for that, being cast into the nested chasm within chasm that characterize our inability to live properly in the present world, to live properly with each other, or to live properly with ourselves.

Adam the son of God was created into the only state of existence and the only relationship with God that we might imagine was perfect, and indeed it is beyond our imaginings.  Jesus teaches us that the only thing we can do is forsake the life (with attached world) that is all we know, and trust Jesus' assurance that beyond this forsaking is the existence that Adam and all of us should ever know.