Paul says, “I die everyday.” I am not saying we know exactly what he means. He did say it just after he mentions the baptism for the dead, after all, and none of us pretend to know what that is about. But he felt the need to reiterate his claim of daily dying by saying, “I mean that, brothers and sisters.” For Paul, the resurrection was the last piece of the puzzle that made all of that dying worth it. Without the resurrection, he says, we Christians are to be pitied above everyone else in the world. Yet, Paul does not rush past the death of Jesus on his way to Easter Sunday. In fact, the death of Jesus is the central act in the story has redefined his life. It is the context that gives the resurrection its true meaning. It represents a posture toward the world that Paul not only imitates himself, but he calls the Corinthians to imitate his imitated posture. When Paul says he dies everyday, he does so as one who has chosen to live the rest of his life in the death of Jesus. Elsewhere, Paul says things like, “I have been crucified with Christ,” and “we carry the death of Jesus around within our bodies.” Paul anticipates a day in which he will be resurrected and death will have no more claim on him, but until then, Paul is living his life as a dead man walking—a man sentenced to die a daily form of death until he finally dies a literal death.
Morose? Perhaps. Appealing? Maybe not. On target? Dead on (I’d apologize for the pun here if it wasn’t so obviously intentional).
Let’s face it. There is a lot of death in what we do as Christians. We die to ourselves in baptism. We remember the Lord’s death as we break his body and drink his blood in the Eucharist. It can be a bit of a stretch for people living in a culture that does everything it can to avoid discussions of death and our own mortality. That is part of why we prefer dwelling on the resurrection of Christ to living in the death of Christ. We prefer the pleasant aspects of our faith and avoid the part that, at best, seems strange to us and, at worst, makes us frighteningly uncomfortable. We prefer to think of Jesus’ death as the necessary step for the important part (the resurrection) to take place. Yet, if we value Paul’s perspective on the relationship of Jesus’ death to that of his resurrection, we must consider the possibility that it is the other way around. Rather than the death of Jesus being the necessary step in making resurrection possible, what if we look at the resurrection as that which makes living as one sentenced to death for the sake of the world meaningful, bearable, and worth pursuing.
This is why Paul can boast of his suffering—for if he can share in Christ’s death, he can share in his resurrection. Yet, resurrection entails more than life after death in Paul’s view. In Galatians, Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ, yet nevertheless I live, but not I, but Christ, lives in me and the life that I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loves me and gave himself for me.” In Romans, he speaks of those who are baptized as dying to themselves and being raised again to walk in the newness of life. Paul sees a resurrected life for us in this life as we die to sin and take up life in the Spirit, possessing a renewed mind (or as he calls it in 1 Corinthians and Philippians, the mind of Christ). Yet, that resurrection takes place after (and only after) we die to ourselves.
The tricky part is that this dying isn’t a once for all kind of event. As Paul put it, “I die everyday.” Everyday we have to decide again to die to ourselves in order to be made alive again in Jesus. Each death precedes a resurrection. The question is whether that resurrection is a resurrection of a Christlike self or the resurrection of the old self.
My greatest frustration with my own experience is that I too often experience a resurrection of the old self. I find that I rarely mature as much as I think that I have. All it takes is for the circumstances of my life to change a tad and I start behaving and thinking in ways I thought I outgrew long ago. As such, the self to which I thought I died comes right back to life. This isn’t the Christlike resurrection in which a spiritual transformation takes place, it is more of a resuscitation of someone I only thought/hoped was dead. But no matter what, death to self will give way to one kind of life or the other.
So, I am trying to take hold of dying everyday conceptually. It’s hard enough as a concept. As a reality to be embraced, I must confess, I am more than daunted by the example that Paul sets for us there. And yet, there is hint of hope in Paul’s words too. The fact that the call of Jesus demands we make a choice to die every day means that we need not feel defeated whenever the old self shows its selfish face. It means that such a resuscitation of the old self is a natural one for which we know the well-practiced remedy.
But what about the desire? How to we come to find this approach to the world appealing? And how do we get that appeal to stick once we find it? What will call us back to this calling once the appeal wears off? This is why I think we need to begin thinking not just in terms of spiritual formation, but in terms of Christian cruciformation. We are not seeking to be better meditators simply to experience God in our hearts and minds. We are seeking to be better meditators so that God will transform our hearts and minds into the image of his Son. So too is the case for any other discipline.
Instead of being daunted by our own inability to live up to Paul’s example of dying to himself everyday, we should take up spiritual practices that allow us to submit to a calling that is more challenging than we are ready to accept.
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