I spent half of yesterday having my personality tested for my upcoming transfer to the Episcopal room in God's mansion. It set me to thinking about our chapter on mission and this conclusion about Jesus: These attributes—openness, vulnerability, receptivity, humility, fearlessness, faithfulness—are some of the hallmarks of what we might call a spirituality of mission, the sort of approach that Christians can take to the world.
After answering hundreds of questions on the personality tests, I noticed how many dealt with anxiety. This set me to pondering how our existence is belabored with a kind of survival anxiety.
Due to this anxiety we can be tempted to possess, own or dominate some part of the world to secure our status, health, and security. Obviously, when we are all doing this, human existence becomes competitive, envious, selfish and violent. In short, the "identity of possession" can also be seen as one source of sin in our lives.
This is the predominant idea in a book I read a while back by Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology. McGill demonstrates how Jesus' identity comes from outside of himself and how as Christians we must "die" and discover that our identity comes from outside of ourselves, from God. We must let go of the "technique of having," of possessing ourselves and cultivate a posture of gratitude and acknowledgment that our being is in God, not in us.
McGill writes: What is the center, the real key, to sinful identity? It is the act of possession; the act of making oneself and the resources needed for oneself one's own. This act can be described with another term: domination. If I can hold onto myself as my own, as something I really possess and really control, then I am dominating myself. A sinful kind of identity surely requires aggression or appeasement; it requires defenses against others and against the threat of death as final dispossession. But fundamentally, a sinful kind of identity consists in the act of domination.
The key for the spiritual person is to bypass this cycle of domination/possession. In the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection--these are not read as personal windows into Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth.
Jesus himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus does not confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him.
In all the early testimony to Jesus, this particular characteristic is identified with the fact that Jesus knows that his reality comes from God...Jesus never has his own being; he is continually receiving it...He is only as one who keeps receiving himself from God.
Does our reality come from God? Do we really "possess" our own being? What does it mean for Jesus to continually receive himself from God?
McGill suggests that we must struggle to be dispossessed of our anxiety: Because I no longer live by virtue of the reality which I possess, which I hold, which I master and keep at my disposal, I am free to share myself and all my possession with others. Above all...I can be honest with others. Since I never have myself, I can never be dispossessed of myself. In short, in all my relations with other people I am freed from the anxiety of having always to keep possession of my own reality in order to be.
Perhaps a whole new way to ponder death and resurrection this week...again, I pray: let Him increase, let me decrease.
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