Perhaps we need to hear Jesus’ words as a command to deny our default ways of valuing and measuring the self.
Reader’s Note: This article discusses the topic of suicide.
For a Christian, the obvious answer to the question “what needs to die?” is “the self.” As Jesus tells his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23, ESV). We tend to hear this as a command to deny the disordered appetites and desires of the self, and there is surely some truth to that. But perhaps we need to hear Jesus’ words in a more radical way: as a command to deny our default ways of valuing and measuring the self. In a technological age obsessed with metrics that chart our physical activity, intellectual productivity, emotional health, and overall impact, denying the self as a measurable entity—an entity whose worth can be quantified and so judged to be ineffective or effective, insignificant or impactful, dispensable or indispensable—sounds radical indeed.
Yet the arrangement of Luke’s Gospel points us toward this way of reading Jesus’ words. Just a few verses after the disciples hear these instructions, they are arguing over “which of them was the greatest.” Jesus responds by taking a child on his lap and pointing toward a different view of the self: “He who is least among you all is the one who is great” (Luke 9:48, ESV). This paradox, one that lies at the heart of the kingdom of God, suggests that if I die to a vision of my self as great or essential, I may be freed to live faithfully in childlike wonder and gratitude.
In his wry self-help book Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy offers a thought experiment relating to suicide that might help us feel the radical weight of Jesus’ command …