Dying with Christ

Homily for Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Today’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy and the Gospel text from the Gospel of St. Luke seem to present us with a paradox. Moses asks the children of Israel choose life, yet Jesus tells his disciples that they must lose their life in order to gain it.

The process of losing one’s life begins with our Baptism. John the Baptist preached a baptism of repentance. As he dipped each person into the river Jordan, he said: “Be clean.” Jesus uses a much stronger metaphoric statement. Jesus asks us to “die.” As St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans, “You also must consider yourselves dead.” In baptism, the “old Adam” is drowned. In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul is very clear: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

The chief biblical analogy for baptism is not the water that washes but the flood that drowns. Discipleship is more than turning over a new leaf. It is more fitful and disorderly than gradual moral formation. Nothing less than daily, often painful, lifelong death will do.

The status quo is alluring. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the six-thirty news, our institutions, theologies, and politics. The only way we will break its hold on us is to be transferred to another dominion, to be cut loose from our old certainties, to be thrust under the flood and then pulled forth fresh and newborn. When Jesus stepped into the River Jordan and approached John the Baptist, he began his trek toward Golgotha. Today we are told that we are to follow him.