By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
There exists a truth, one of the hard and adamant truths, which dwells in the crevices of conscience and awaits an opportune night, a night thirsting for blood and promising false dawns, so that it may emerge complete and irrevocable, as if by a divine decree. And this is the truth inaugurated through an invitation that sounds like a condemnation: “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself.” Here, precisely in this first, almost violent severance, is founded the whole paradoxical edifice of faith.
For it does not ask of us simply some correction or moral improvement or addition of some virtue to the already existing edifice of the ego; but it asks for its demolition. Complete denial, not of our sinful past, but of the very core which we call “self”, this nervous assemblage of desires, fears, memories and projections which we persist in considering as our identity.
And modern man, this creature who has deified self-realisation and elevated his psychological integrity to the highest good, stands before this voice with the perplexity of some merchant who is asked to burn his merchandise in order that he may profit. How deny your self, when your whole civilisation is a continuous and anxious attempt to define it, express, heal, develop?
Our daily life is a labyrinth of mirrors, where every surface reflects some version of the ego which we study to maintain. But the invitation remains, a biting silence midst the restless noise of self-referentiality. To take up your cross. Not a symbolic cross, some ornament about the neck or some abstract concept of pain, but your own cross – this very construction of failure, pain, mortality and betrayal which constitutes our individual destiny. To take it up, not with the passivity of the victim, but with the active will of him who sees in the wood of dishonour the only way to glory.
Through the blood rolling from it is revealed a cartography of agony, which however leads to an unmapped place. The logic of the world is simple, almost vulgar in its arithmetical purity: profit and loss. To save your soul, guard it from corruption, armour it against losses. And the Word comes with a reversal resembling madness and proclaims that whosoever will save this soul, shall lose it. And whosoever shall lose it, for His sake, this one and only this one shall find it.
There is an economy of salvation operating according to the rules of the anti-world. Loss becomes investment, death becomes life.
Origen, plunging into this same convulsive reversal, formulates it with precision that cuts off breath, saying that if we wish to save our soul in order to receive it better, we must lose it through martyrdom (Εἰ θέλομεν ἡμῶν σῶσαι τὴν ψυχὴν, ἵνα αὐτὴν ἀπολάβωμεν κρείττονα ψυχῆς, μαρτυρίῳ ἀπολέσωμεν αὐτήν).[1] Martyrdom here is not only bodily destruction, but the daily, conscious mortification of the will, the steady choice of love against self-preservation.
Indeed, “for what shall a man profit, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The question is not rhetorical; it is an existential balance upon which all things are placed. The “whole world” is nothing but the sum of finite desires, power, pleasure, knowledge which does not lead to love, security which is built upon sand. And on the other side, the soul. Not the soul as some vague philosophical concept, but as the very possibility of communion with God, as the according to image which we bear like a seal and wound. What exchange can be given for this? Nothing. Every attempt to ransom it is already its loss.
We see around us, and perhaps in ourselves – if we are sufficiently brave to see -, men who have gained their world. They have success, recognition, prosperity. But their faces are often a mask of death, their eyes the shadow of a broken mirror, because in the journey they exchanged the infinite with the ephemeral, sold their soul not to the devil, but to the much more prosaic and grey tyranny of their ego.
Confession before men and the confession of the Son before the Father are connected by a thread invisible but unbreakable. To be ashamed of Christ and his words “in this adulterous and sinful generation” is not a simple act of cowardice. It is a deeper metaphysical choice. It is an attempt to hold both worlds, to be pleasing both to God and to Caesar, to enjoy the comfort of faith in the private sphere, not allowing it however to corrode the public image, the social position, the professional advancement.
It is hypocrisy, not in the form of clamorous theatricality, but in the form of discreet, well-bred schizophrenia. And the response is absolute: whosoever shall be ashamed of me, I also will be ashamed of him. The Kingdom of God is not a closed club of the morally blameless, but neither is it a salon of the lukewarm. It demands wholeness, a decision penetrating every fold of existence. It is a noose of light catching you in order to free you.
And midst this atmosphere of absolute demand, falls like a cool breath after scorching heat, the final, enigmatic promise: that some of those standing shall not taste death until they see the Kingdom coming “in power”. It is not a promise of immortality upon earth. It is something infinitely more important. It is an assurance that the Kingdom is not only a future reward, but a present reality, a power invading time, a seed breaking through the soil of history.
One can see it in the Transfiguration which follows, one can feel it in the community of love, one can live it in the personal mortification leading to resurrection. It is light in depth, which however already illuminates our steps in the present. Midst the devastated sorrow of the world, midst the silence of chaos threatening to swallow us, this presence is the only guarantee that the loss of self is not a leap into void, but entrance into the only reality which does not perish.
[1] Origen, “Ta Heuriskomena Panta” [The Complete Findings], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 11 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857), 580.
