Escaping the Event Horizon

Escaping the Event Horizon--April 6, 2018

"For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them." [2 Corinthians 5:14-15]

A black hole, astronomers will tell you, is a frightening place to find yourself.  That is because a black hole is an object so dense and bent in on itself that even light cannot get out (hence the descriptive name, "black hole").  Its gravity tears to confetti everything that falls into it, into the darkness past the boundary called the "event horizon," and needless to say, there can be no life at the heart of a black hole.

Curiously enough, a black hole is desolate, not because it is empty (as one might incorrectly infer from the word "hole"), but because it is actually so full of itself that its gravitational appetite cannot stop consuming.  A black hole takes and takes, and never gives, while the swirling matter around it is heated to lethally high temperatures and gives off deadly radiation.  A black hole destroys and consumes that which is life-giving, and expels out only what brings death.  As I say, a frightening place to find oneself.

And without being overly melodramatic about it, it is also a frightening thing to find in your own heart.

All the more frightening, then, to hear the New Testament's assessment that each of us on our own is rather like those voracious astronomical beasties--we, too, are bent in on ourselves and predisposed only to take and take and take... and to put ourselves first. 

That's basically Paul's diagnosis here from what we call Second Corinthians: that we have all been living for ourselves, and perhaps we have even been told somewhere along the way that the "me first" way of life is just the law of the jungle.  Well as the existence of black holes in the universe will confirm, sure, it is possible to exist in a state of perpetual self-centeredness, only concerned for looking out for Me and My Interests, it is also a rather death-dealing sort of existence.  Sometimes we get so hung up on our fears of scary things "out there" in the world, with talk of "bad guys" and "those scary outsiders who are out there coming for us" and other dangerous boogeymen out there, when really the thing that is killing us--is our own bent-in-on-self orientation.

Again, I don't mean to be melodramatic at all here, but quite literal--the impulse to say that "I matter first, more than anybody else around me" is the kind of mindset that leads people to treat others like they are disposable, to become numb to the value of every life, and to then just become numb to everything.  So often, it is that kind of terrifying numbness that mass shooters display, because they have ceased to think about the people they are terrorizing as people of any worth.  So often, it is that kind of terrible callousness of the soul that leads priests and Levites to pass by the people we see lying in the ditch on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho (or the drive from work to home).  So often, it is that kind of desensitized self-centeredness that ceases thinking about how our actions and choices affect other people and can only see the world in terms of clutching onto our own stuff... our own rights... our own comfort.  We don't even notice how we have let our hearts collapse under their own density into black holes of the spirit.  Maybe we figure that this is just how everybody acts, and therefore that it must be OK, even commendable, to eke out our existence by living for ourselves.  Before long, I don't even realize that I have become dead inside.

But Christ offers us something different.  In fact, the "something" Christ brings is precisely the opposite of what we have done to ourselves.  Like a rescue mission in a science fiction movie, Jesus' death and resurrection pulls me out of the black hole I have created inside myself and bends me back outward to give myself away, rather than living only for myself.  Jesus rescues us from beyond the event horizon, and pulls us back outward from being bent in on ourselves, back into relationship with others, with God, with all creation. And it turns out that being turned inside out like that is precisely how to be fully alive.

Wendell Berry offers these words in one of my favorite of his "Sabbath Poems."  He writes:

"Loving you has taught me the inifinite

longing of the self to be given away

and the great difficulty of that entire

giving, for in love to give is to receive

and then there is yet more to give...."

It's a beautiful and paradoxical truth: the more we give ourselves away in love--that is to say, the more we no longer live "for ourselves"--the more we find we have received, and so there is more of ourselves we have to give and to give again.  It is precisely the opposite of the black hole--instead of taking and taking, endlessly consuming and at the same time destroying all life and light it encounters, the Christ-life is oriented outward, and yet we find ourselves endlessly able to give ourselves away, precisely because the life of the living Christ keeps pouring into us and through us outward.

That's what it means to live "no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them."   To live for Jesus doesn't mean that Jesus now becomes the endlessly consuming black hole, but rather that that risen Jesus orients us to give ourselves away to the world (as Paul notes, "all")  that Jesus loves, the same world for whom Christ Jesus emptied himself (see Philippians 2:5-11 on that point).

We have a way of getting this all backwards and messed up.  We sometimes talk like all this business about giving ourselves away to others is some kind of "catch" to the Gospel--as if the Good News goes something like, "You believe in Jesus and you get to go to heaven... but what they don't tell you is that then you have to do a whole bunch of extra nice stuff to other people to hold your seat on the bus to the afterlife."  We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that Christianity is first and foremost an answer to the question, "What do I have to DO to get myself into heaven?" when that is honestly still a self-oriented way of framing the question.  What the risen Christ really does is to pull us out of our own spiritual black holes so that I am no longer cut off from everybody else--and from God--and I am actually brought into the life that really is life.  And living for Christ and for others is no longer a "catch" or a requirement for earning eternal life--rather, it is what life was really meant to be about all along!  

The "meaning of life," so to speak, then, is not to live for ourselves, but always oriented outward--toward "the other," which includes both Christ and the world for whom Christ died.  And the more and more fully Christ re-orients us outward to love and serve all people, the more fully we will be alive, not just "after we die," but right here and now.  And the more we are directed outward in allegiance to the risen life of Jesus and in love toward all people and all creation, the more we will find ourselves filled--and then, as Wendell Berry says, we will have all the more to give all over again, so the cycle continues in ever-flowing abundance--which is another way of saying "the life that is eternal."

The voices of the world around us just don't get it--they are still convinced that you have to put yourself first in this life, and that "winners" are the ones who get, while "losers" are the ones who "give."  They say it so confidently and so self-assuredly, like this is self-evident, that you almost can't see how pitiably empty and hollow they are on the inside.  That's the thing about black holes, whether of the astronomical or the spiritual kind: no matter how much they grab for themselves, they are still a bottomless abyss.  Rather pathetic, honestly.

That's the freedom, the grace, and the gift that Christ gives us: we don't have to be those empty black holes anymore.  Christ's risen life makes it possible for us no longer to be oriented only around ourselves, so that we can discover that life is paradoxically at its fullest when we are most giving ourselves away, because we are no longer living "for ourselves" but "for the one who died and was raised for us."

You are free now.  None other than Jesus himself pulled you from beyond the darkness of the event horizon.  And now you are free... what will you do with this day then?

Lord Jesus, keep pulling us out of ourselves into your risen life.