Die to Yourself
Some fragmented thoughts on Jesus's model of self-sacrifice, the ritual of foot-washing, ramen noodles, and a theological riff on compost
Lent VII
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Greetings on this Holy Thursday, dear reader.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a sermon the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney preached on Palm Sunday. Jesus’s ride into Jerusalem on the back of a borrowed donkey wasn’t particularly regal. It wasn’t the parade you’d expect of a standard-issue ancient king, who typically rode warhorses and conquered by brute force. “Monarchs went to war on the frontlines,” Gafney said. “They sliced and diced, battered and broke, crushed and stomped their enemies to death. Every song about victory in battle means somebody’s son, somebody’s child, was coming home broken and in pieces or covered with the bone, blood, and brains of someone else’s child. Monarchy was inextricable from warfare in the ancient world.”
Jesus was a different kind of king. “Jesus didn’t want to be king. Kings take but Jesus gives,” Gafney said. “A king will take your life if you get in his way, but Jesus gives life without end, life through death, life on the other side of the grave.”
Life without end. Life through death. Life on the other side of the grave.
I’ve been thinking a lot about those words as we’ve moved through Holy Week—and about the stories of Jesus’s slow march to the cross. There’s a deeply human moment when he’s not just hungry but seemingly hangry, and he curses the fig tree that offers no fruit. And there’s that topsy-turvy scene where he washes his disciples’ feet.
The Holy Week traditions of my childhood didn’t include foot-washing—and thank God for that, because I don’t really like feet. I’ve never been a walk-barefoot-through-the-grass person. I don’t want anyone to touch my feet; once, I was given a pedicure as a gift, and I just sat there wishing it would end. I’d cook you a thousand meals, but please don’t ask me to wash anyone’s feet.
To cleanse the disciples’ dirty feet was yet another act of incredible humility. For God-with-us to be truly with us by washing away the dust of the day’s journey evoked the purifying waters of baptism. Undoubtedly, it was a gesture of loving servitude—a small prelude of the grand sacrifice still to come.
But where was Jesus’s pride? His sense of station? His respect for the proper order of things?
Life without end. Life through death. Life on the other side of the grave.
Some months ago, I was embroiled in conflict with a person I barely know. I’d tried not to say any ugly things, but I will confess to you that I had thought ugly ones. I can’t speak to what was happening in the other person’s heart and mind, except to say that I know they were hurt by my actions. The words they sent my way stung, and I responded from a defensive crouch.
A mutual friend sought to forge reconciliation. She listened well and at painful length to my tedious moaning and my self-pitying whining. She also asked what goodness I might be able to summon, what grace I might be able to offer. “Nothing,” I said. “I’ve got nothing.”
One night, I woke sometime around 3 a.m. and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I started ruminating and internally moaning and whining a bit, maybe to myself, maybe to God; a particularly generous person might call it prayer. I am not a woo-woo person. Though I rarely make claims about what God is or is not saying to me, in this instance, it felt different. “Die to yourself,” the voice said to me. “Die to yourself.”
This was not an interesting suggestion to me. So I fought my way back to sleep.
When I rose the next morning, the echoes were still annoyingly there: “Die to yourself. Die to yourself.”
My friend, who shall remain anonymous but let’s call her Barah Sessey, had suggested I might try to write a few lines in a spirit of love, grace, and forgiveness. Of course Barah was right—she usually is. If the Holy Spirit occasionally visits my house, it seems to live at hers. But she was also missing my point, perhaps willfully: I wanted my goodness to be acknowledged. I wanted to be told that my feelings were valid. I wanted to be reminded that those feelings mattered—that I mattered.
As I went to bed that night, one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture, from Romans 8, came to mind: We are more than conquerors through him who loved us... Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ Jesus who is our Lord. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to be a conqueror: I wanted to win the argument and to be right. Perhaps what Paul meant, though, was that we’re called not to conquest and then some but to another way of living altogether. Also, why wasn’t Christ’s love enough for me? Why was I giving another person so much power to question my goodness, my feelings, even my belovedness? Why did I feel so little gratitude and show so little grace?
Then I heard it again: “Die to yourself.”
Life without end. Life through death. Life on the other side of the grave.
“Die to yourself” is not a popular line nowadays. In individualistic American culture, self-care, self-fulfillment, and self-worth, all good in moderation, have often been elevated to demigod status. And the emptying of self has too often been weaponized and toxified. What was once a holy invitation has become a profane means of denigration and desecration used to control and diminish people rather than to bless and grow them.
It’s especially unfortunate that the latter has typically been done in the name of humility. Humility isn’t self-debasement or self-abuse or self-flagellation. There is nothing false about its modesty. Humility, which is rooted in the Latin word for “ground,” asks us to see things as they actually are—not greater, not smaller. It is clear-eyed. It is bracingly honest. It is true.
To die to oneself does not mean to be the world’s doormat, does not mean to subject oneself to constant humiliation, does not mean to play the martyr, does not mean to invite abuse, and does not mean to remain silent in the face of real injustice. You have to know what your power is so that you choose how to use it. To die to oneself demands a candid interrogation of where we seek meaning and worth, validation and value, sustenance and strength. In pursuing the love and support of mere humans, what am I saying to and about the One whose love and support are eternal?
Life without end. Life through death. Life on the other side of the grave.
Tomorrow is Good Friday. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “Good Friday” comes from an obsolete form of the word “good“; in Old English, “guode” meant “holy.” As time passes, scars fade, cultures change, and the meanings of words shift, such that it can be hard to hold onto the original reality.
Other languages are clearer about what the day actually means. The German Karfreitag derives from a medieval word meaning “lamentation” or “sorrow.” The Chinese for Good Friday is blunter still: 耶穌受難節. 耶穌 means “Jesus,” 受難 means “suffering,” and 節 means “festival”; taken together, it’s the Festival of Jesus’s Suffering.
These names urge us not to rush toward Easter glory before we’ve reckoned with Christ’s death. Though I make no claims to understand fully what Jesus’s suffering was ultimately for—you’ll get no clear atonement theory here—I do have some notions about what it demonstrated: stunning faithfulness in the face of misunderstanding and betrayal, tender grace amidst hardness and recrimination, love against hate.
There’s no way to a flourishing life of resurrection that doesn’t first go through death. To die to ourselves is to say that we learned something from Christ’s self-sacrifice. To die to ourselves is to honor how he suffered at the hands of humanity so that others might not suffer. To die to ourselves is to live in the paradox of Jesus’s good news.
Life without end. Life through death. Life on the other side of the grave.
A few days after I began hearing, “Die to yourself,” I opened my laptop and plunked out a few excruciating lines, apologizing for harm I’d done and hurt I’d caused. Whenever the feeling crept up—and it did, repeatedly—that I, too, was owed an apology, the email took a turn for the retributive. Whenever I wrote something meant to inflict yet more pain or to justify myself, I summoned the forgiving possibilities of the “delete” key and kept returning to the voice in the night: “Die to yourself.”
My best self knew that the recipient of my email might need their goodness to be acknowledged. They might need to be told that their feelings were valid. They might need to be reminded that those feelings mattered—that they mattered. And perhaps this could be a form of foot-washing. Perhaps this could be an act of service for someone who had trod a path I could never understand but whose feet bore witness to the difficult journey. Perhaps I could crack my hard heart open just enough to offer a tiny bit of love.
In these last days of Lent, holding onto hope in a donkey-riding king who paraded toward his own grave on a wave of hosannas, I’m considering the sacrifices I don’t want to make but might need to. What am I holding tightly that I might have to relinquish? What needs to be grieved, mourned, and committed to God to be redeemed for good? What reeks of death even as I insist on calling it life? And what needs to die so that something else—something better, something more beautiful—might live?
Life without end. Life through death. Life on the other side of the grave.
Amen.
What I’m Growing: The lavender, lemon balm, and snapdragon are coming up. My fine-motor skills are clearly lacking. Look at how uneven the distribution of starter soil is! Look how many snapdragon seeds I accidentally dumped in! Peppers went into trays on Tuesday, tomatoes yesterday. Just like I’m constantly checking on Fozzie when he’s napping to see whether he’s still breathing, I probably go visit my plants eight times a day to make sure they haven’t dried out since the last time. It’s weird.
What I’m Cooking: Someone asked me last week whether I “ever have a plain old hamburger or something you can just microwave.” Here’s my secret: I only have to share one thing I cook each week! We love burgers. Lately we’ve been topping them with caramelized onions, sautéed mushrooms, and melted cheese. Also, we microwave stuff all the time: If we have pasta or stir-fry for dinner, I usually double the batch so that there will be leftovers for lunch for the next day or two.
Another quick meal: ramen noodles. Yes, the kind out of the package. We like Shin Ramyun, a Korean brand available at most Asian grocery stores, and our favorite is Shin Light, which is air-dried, not fried. You need one packet of noodles per person. I only use half of the powdered soup base, even a little less. My strategy for dressing it up: lots of fresh vegetables (bok choy, spinach, mushrooms, scallions) and broth (chicken, vegetable, or whatever you have) instead of water. If you’re fancy, you can add an egg (soft-boiled, fried, or just cracked into the pot to poach with everything else). On ramen nights, dinner is done in 15 or 20 minutes.
What I’m Reading: You know I’m a sucker for a good theological riff on compost. Justin Eisinga, who was hired to build a compost operation at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, offers a lovely one here. “To build a compost bin is king to building a tomb, except this tomb is not meant to encase death permanently,” he writes. “The compost bin is a tomb built for resurrection.”
If you celebrate Easter, I wish you a blessed one. May the hope of the day be all the more resplendent, given the sorrow of the Festival of Jesus’s Suffering, the liminality of Holy Saturday, and the pain and suffering of this world.
That’s it for this week. As always, I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.
Yours,
Jeff
Love you, Ceff Jhu. xoxo
This was necessary and beautiful. Thank you.
Also: Barah Sessey 😂