Luke 9:24 - Homiletics

The life saved, and the life lost.

The martyr, then, is the type of the true Christian. Christ ( Luke 9:22 ) predicts his own fate. And immediately afterwards ( Luke 9:23 ) he announces to all that whosoever will come after him must, through the gate of suffering, pass into glory; must "deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow him." This is the essence of martyrdom. The martyr is not necessarily one who is burned at the stake, or slain by the sword, or left to rot in damp prison-cells; he is one who, in will, surrenders the life to God, and daily bears the cross of Jesus. Let not the variations of the meaning attached to the words "save" and "lose" be overlooked. In the first clause, "Whosoever wills to save shall lose;" i.e. whosoever is bent on preserving the life may in a sense preserve it, but, in the nobler sense, he shall lose his real being, or as in the verse following, "he shall lose himself. " In the second clause, "Whosoever wills to lose his life for Christ's sake"—to subordinate all considerations merely personal to the command of a supreme affection—may incur shame, may suffer many things, but, in the nobler sense, he shall realize the truth of his existence, he shall receive the crown of his life. Ah! wonderfully suggestive are the sharp antitheses of Jesus' saying. What, then, is the abiding reality of the Christian type of manhood? of the true martyr-life? Shall we say that the abiding reality is a capacity of self-forgetfulness ? Undoubtedly, there is this capacity. We recognize the man of genuine goodness at once. With him there is no part-acting. He is not one who stands before mirrors, studying attitudes and effects; in what he does there is the absence of the feeling of self. "Whither the spirit that is in him is to go, he goes straight forward." A great enthusiasm always removes the action, if not from the shadow, at least from "the corrosive power," of selfishness. Certainly, Christ looked forward to a love that could hold the closest affections as only second to it; that could sacrifice all in which the self is most bound up; that, as against the very pleadings of nature, would close with a higher vision, "Here am I send me." And, more or less, this is always a characteristic of the martyred soul. "If," says Thomas a Kempis, "a man should give all his substance, yet is it nothing. And if he should practise great repentance, still it is little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is still afar off. And if he should be of great virtue, and of fervent devotion, yet there is much wanting; especially one thing which is most necessary for him. And what is that? That leaving all, he forsake himself, and go wholly from himself, and retain nothing out of self-love." But, when we speak of self-forgetfulness, we speak of only half the truth. The question remains—Whence the inward pressure which causes this self-forgetting spirit? We cannot be self-denying by the mere resolution to be so. We may subject ourselves to the most rigid of disciplines, and the result only be that we assert self in one aspect to deny self in another aspect. There must be some force in the soul, some obligation which, once discerned, becomes an irresistible spiritual power. Take, e.g. , one of the purest forms of self-devotion. The mother's love is not an affair of reasoning. There is no calculation of quantity in it. When the child is stricken with sickness she watches by the bed and ministers to the wants of the sufferer, denying herself by day and night, and never stopping to ask what is the limit to be observed. The action is the consequence of an obligation inlaid in the relation of mother to child. This relation takes her out of self. She "goes wholly from herself, and retains nothing out of self-love." She loses her life in the child. And thus with self-sacrifice, through its diversity of forms. Its root is, some relation into which one mind enters with another, or with a higher and vaster issue whose vision has dawned on it. The relation supplies at once the motive, and the food which nourishes the motive. It is in the mind an omnipotent " I must. " Remember, self-sacrifice may be a power for evil as well as good. The devil's martyrs far outnumber God's martyrs. For what is evil, or for ends that are "not of the Father, but of the world," persons spend themselves with a zeal and persistence which may well put Christians to shame. Self-consecration is not necessarily a Christian virtue. It is the character of the alliance into which the soul enters which makes the virtue. "He that loseth his life for my sake the same shall save it." This was the new thing which came into the world through Jesus Christ. Truthfulness as between man and man was no new thing. The sanctions of morality were no new thing. Through the religions and philosophies of paganism there came gleams of an ethic pure and spiritual. But an obligation to One unseen, yet ever-present, One to whom the life was bound, and in whom the life was hidden; an obligation that regulated all aims, that was sovereign over all the action, to deny which, or be false to which, was the soul's damnation;—that was the new thing. And that new thing was the secret of the Christian martyr-life. And it was this Christian martyr-life which lifted the individual man from his obscurity, as a mere unit in the mass of humanity, and invested him, be he bond or be he free, with the inalienable glory of the calling—"an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Christ." And from that day to this there has echoed back, from a great multitude which no man can number, the sweetly constraining "For my sake." The cross of Jesus has really gone before the ages. Its spirit has entered into the conditions of human life, has influenced the minds and hearts of men far more widely than we can estimate. We trace its witness far outside the circle of his professing followers. But where the response to him is conscious, where there is a real personal relation to him, where the adoring cry of Thomas, "My Lord and my God!" is felt,—in this supreme spiritual affiance we recognize the pressure which constrains to live not to self, in Jesus' love to lose the life for Jesus, sake. It is this pressure which bestows a beauty quite unique on the career of a man who has a place in the foremost rank of Christian heroes. Exploits brilliant and daring are associated with the name of Gordon. And whether we think of him in China, or in Egypt, or in the quiet garrison town, or speeding on the swift dromedary across the desert, or shut up in Khartoum, waiting for the succours that arrived too late, and facing death as one who had learned to regard it without quailing,—there is always an unmistakable and lofty individuality. But the crown of the glory is the spiritual elevation of the soul, the enthusiasm for God and good which filled the heart. How he believed in God!—not to him a mere sign of some unknown quantity, but the Living One, the Father in heaven. 'How he believed m Christ!—not a mere "apotheosis of humanity," but Jesus Christ who is to-day what he was yesterday, and of whom he writes, "There would be no one so unwelcome to come and reside in this world as our Saviour, while the world is in the state it now is." How he believed in the government of the world by a loving and righteous will! To reveal this will; to work out its purpose with all his might; to raise the down man; to strike the fetter from the slave; to make God's universe a little better, happier, wholesomer;—for this he lived, for this he died. Died? Nay, verily, "the immortal dead live again in minds made better by their presence." He who loses his life for Jesus' sake, he only has saved it. Let this, then, be accepted as the lesson of Jesus' saying: We find the true life, tile great, wide, everlasting Christlife, only by losing, for his sake, the narrow, small, merely self-life. Shall it be said by any that to speak thus is to speak in parables? that heroics are not for ordinary Christian people living in quiet, ordinary ways? There is no parable. The words bear on all in all sorts and conditions. Every person is called to settle on what plan his life shall be built, what manner of person he shall be. He who has no ideal of conduct is little better than a creature drifting through his days. The Christian ideal is sketched in this word of the Lord. If any one will come after Christ, let him know this; and let him know further that it is not the circumstances that make the man—he makes his place, works his ideal out in different kinds of circumstances. General Gordon, in an obscurer lot, in a humbler sphere, might not have developed the same amount of force; but, given the grace of God with him, he would have developed the same kited of force, he would have been the same type of man. And it is faithfulness to this type in the place we occupy, there not elsewhere, that Christ demands. Are we confessing him before men? Day by day, do we take his cross and follow him? Then, no matter what the scene of the life-work may be, we are losing our life for his sake. This is the obligation of that life" which martyred men have made more glorious for us who strive to follow."