The Soul
The Soul
Trinity 15, Yr A, 2008
‘For what will it profit someone if they gain the whole world and lose their life?’
+ In nomine …
How will you save your soul?
Most of us tend to think saving lives is generally a good thing, and that losing them is not so good. This is why we applaud lifeguards and rescue teams and mourn tragedies. And it seems this natural instinct is even stronger when it comes to our own lives. Most of, most of the time, unless something is pretty wrong, want to hold on to life rather than lose it.
So what on earth does our Lord mean in today’s gospel when he says ‘whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it’. Here he seems to have taken these things of saving and losing lives, reversed our usual expectations and then linked these two opposites together. What’s going on here? As someone commented in this month’s magazine, no wonder the disciples didn’t seem to get it half the time. I guess we need to look again and try and understand this saying. If we do this we may find we need to work out what we mean by ‘saving’ and ‘losing’ here, and most importantly what we mean by ‘life’.
In older translations of this passage that word ‘life’ didn’t appear and instead we had the word ‘soul’, which is a more obvious translation of the Greek psyche, from which our word psychology comes. Now I think I can see why recent translators dropped this word ‘soul’: it sounds too religious and technical to us today, we get bogged down in theories about a ghost inside the machine of our bodies, whereas in the world of the New Testament it means something more general, like life. But for all its baggage, I think it’s worth holding onto that word soul. Because that word soul, carries a particular view of life, and I think it’s only this view that can help us to make sense of all this strange stuff about saving and losing one’s life.
Do you believe that you have a soul? Some philosophers used to debate about what the soul was made of or where exactly it was in the body. These weird ghostly images tend to stick with us and aren’t always terribly helpful. The word soul originally just meant breath or life and in the Bible it has the more specific sense of a life given by God, as in the creation story when God breathes life into Adam. So if soul means life, it means much more than just basic life, eating and drinking and sleeping and reproducing; it means life in the sense of a wonderful gift, as capable of a relationship with God. To speak of human life in terms of the soul is to say that we are more than just flesh and blood, that we have the seeds of eternity within us. Some people start to worry here. ‘All this talk of the soul devalues the body’ they say, which before you know it leads to people whipping themselves or starving themselves or treating women badly and so on. Now such views have certainly been around in Christian history, but as we discussed in the Lent course this year, they have always been a distortion of basic Christian beliefs such as the goodness of creation and the resurrection of the body. A proper view of the soul enables us to value the body without seeing it as everything. A proper view of the soul enables us to understand life as a gift to be given.
This seems to me the key to understanding these difficult sayings of Jesus: ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’ If, like the materialists ancient and modern, we didn’t believe in the soul, if we believed that life is just a function of the body, then you can see why we might feel the need to hold onto life, to cling desperately to it. When Jesus says ‘whoever would save his life will lose it’ this seems to me to be the sort of ‘saving’ he’s thinking of: if we try and keep our lives to ourselves, completely safe, locked away in a fortress where no one can touch them, then he says we will lose them, we will shrivel up and die spiritually. The soul is not something to be frozen or stuffed and kept in a case. Life is to be lived, a gift to be given, and given away. I often think of one of my favourite lines from William Blake in this respect: ‘He who binds to himself a joy, doth the winged life destroy; he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise.’
So we’ve seen what life means in this context and what might be bad therefore about trying to ‘save’ it, as if it could be kept in a bank. But we’re still left with the hardest thing to understand: what it might mean to really save one’s life by losing it. We’ve already had a hint of it, in saying that life is a gift which has to be given away. This all sounds very rosy and romantic, but in reality there is a shadow that falls across this business of giving our lives away, the shadow of the cross. Because giving our lives away, if we do it with anything like the reckless generosity of God, is a risky, costly business. We may well lose them. Often our love will not be returned, our work will seem to fail and produce nothing. ‘If anyone would come after me’ Christ says ‘let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.’ There is real self-denial in following Christ; not the pointless self-denial of people who hate their own bodies; not self-denial for its own sake, but the sort of costly risky self-denial involved in giving one’s life away in love to those who may not return it. This is the love of enemies of which
This is the logic of the Cross, this is the life of God himself, and from the point of view of the world, this sort of self-sacrifice must be at best tragic and at worst absurd. No wonder St Peter refuses to accept that this can be the way of the Messiah: ‘God forbid Lord!’ To those who have no belief in the soul and the resurrection it cannot make any sense. If our bodily life is all, then surely nothing could be worth losing it? But if we are souls, if our lives are gifts from God, then death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. We do not need to be afraid. It is better to die than to participate in certain things and lose one’s soul. The soul is worth more than all the world’s riches: ‘what shall one give in return for his soul?’ as Christ puts it.
For me the scene in the latest Batman film where two boats full of passengers are given the choice whether to blow up the other boat in order to save themselves, sums up this truth very well. But I won’t spoil the ending for you.
The point is that if we are souls and if we believe in the resurrection, we can make these costly acts of self-denial and sacrifice, we can ‘lose ourselves’, confident in the hope that this is actually how we find ourselves, that nothing will be lost, but we will receive back all that we have given a hundredfold now and in eternity. For most of us, this will not happily be the dramatic laying down of our lives which we see in the martyrs, but, crazy though it might seem to compare the two, these big acts of self-sacrifice have their roots in the tiny habits of self-sacrifice that we learn and practice day by day and week by week to those around us.
‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’
AMEN.