Jesus experienced the fullness of His Father's generosity.
But the optics certainly don't look that way to us when we look for the evidence of generosity through the lens of Jesus' external circumstances- Jesus, Mary and Joseph were forced to flee to Egypt, remained poor, and Jesus was ultimately betrayed, mocked, tortured, stripped, and nailed to a cross in the most humiliating fashion. His death was slow and full of anguish.
Where was His Father's generosity in that?
It seems almost inscrutable to understand in our culture today that Jesus BECAME the embodiment of His Father's generosity through PAIN and SUFFERING...
that through Jesus' pain, suffering and death, the Father unleashed all of His generous gifts of Love, freedom, forgiveness, healing, and eternal restoration upon all of creation.
How are we to grasp this paradox?
Jesus taught his disciples that in order to fully receive God's generosity, we must first let go of ourselves, as He did...
Clearly this teaching unnerves us until we see that even Jesus had to die in order for the generous will of God to come forth in his life.
"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it." Mark 8:34-36
Jesus says that it's about letting ourselves be open to denying ourselves...
But denying ourselves of what?
All too often, we tend to get wrapped around the axle thinking and believing that denying ourselves is about saying "no" to something we really want a lot, or foregoing something we deeply enjoy- like giving up ice cream, social media or Netflix for Lent...(these things are good but just the beginning)....
Without grappling with the deepest truth of what God really wants us to give up...
What God really wants us to deny ourselves of is our false selves!
"That when God begins to do a new thing, old things must pass away. That in order to experience resurrection we, too, must die."
That's the unnerving truth that sounds alot like bad news.
"The good news is that the only thing we stand to lose is the false self, which is not real anyway. The only thing passing away is that crusty old thing that is no longer useful.
Fr. Thomas Keating in The Human Condition writes, "The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story.
It is a series of small humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound. These make room inside us for the Holy Spirit to come and heal. What prevents us from being available to God is gradually evacuated as we keep getting closer and closer to our Center"—the place where God dwells within us as redeemed people. Oftentimes it is suffering that initiates these necessary "evacuations"; even Jesus learned obedience through the things he suffered. (Hebrews 5:8)"
Jesus is teaching about the transformation that happens out of God's generosity when we let our false selves begin to fall away-
To deny ourselves is to see that God, the generous creator who gives good gifts, is the One who must become the center of our attention-to expose our true selves- with Him, soul to soul, in order to live into all of the generous love, freedom, forgiveness, healing and restoration that He wishes to give us.
In other words, true self-denial is to move away from a life of the false self of self-sufficiency, self-ishness, greed, and narcissism....
Denying yourself is the re-orientation of living life NOT from the center of your own core, but finding the center of yourself in the generosity of God's core.
This is the paradigm shift that took place on Easter....rolling away the rock of a world operating on principles of scarcity that begs us to react selfishly -
And There is so much in us that needs to die: false attachments, greed and anger, impatience and stinginess.
to unleash the resurrection power of God's gift of new possibilities...
A creation where God is bringing the world to a new inclusiveness on the basis of God's own continuously unfolding generosity....
A creation with no class structure.
No exclusion.
Every tongue proclaiming the name of Jesus.
Lent, then, is a time to learn dying to our false selves in and through the things we suffer, and into closer communion with the Father, just like Jesus did.
It is a time for experiencing what it is like to have our own outer nature wasting away, while our inner nature is being transformed day by day." Quotes from Ruth Haley Barton, Lent: Dying so that We May Live
Prayer: O Lord, help me make this Lenten season different from the other ones. Awakening to all that needs to die in me to become alive in your extravagant generosity: to die to false attachments, greed and anger, impatience and stinginess, my core of self-centeredness...
Yes, Lord, I have to die—with you, through you, and in you—to become a new creation and live into the incomparable calling you have for me - Enflame me, Holy Spirit to help extinguish the false parts of me that need to be burned off, through your infinitely generous love, forgiveness, freedom and healing.
Amen.
From Lyn Woodruff
River Prayer Reflections
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