“He who wants to save his life will lose it; but he who wants to lose his life for My sake and
the gospels will save it” (Matthew 16:25).
I’m in a foreign land in a store standing in line behind a rangy young lad plucking his purchases from his basket. As he places them on the checkout counter, I notice that though he’s not an American he may as well be one. His neck chain spills from his tee shirt. I’m curious to see what symbol he would wear on the chain. Some American baseball players wear thick pure gold chains with nothing attached: After all, nothing is more precious than they are to themselves, unless it be a gold dollar sign. Others wear crosses. Some wear an Egyptian ankh or else a devil’s root. The young man in the supermarket had a beer can ring on his chain. To each his own.
Legend has it that Pontius Pilate, the only human besides our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ mentioned in the Nicene Creed, wore a razor near his throat. While life was pleasant or at least tolerable he accepted whatever came his way; but if it should turn unbearable, he intended to slit his jugular vein and end it all. Some philosophy of life for a Roman high official. It explains his cynicism when he mocked the Lord on the subject of truth: “What is truth?” For him, nothing, or anything one cares to make it.
How difficult in times like his, or indeed in times like our own when so many with so much to live for perceive no meaning in life beyond material wealth, sensual pleasures, and the so-called “good life.” For them the beer commercial makes sense: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Tell them of the blessed experience to be had plumbing the depths of the soul and they say, “Where is the soul?” or, “What’s a soul anyway?” All students have seen the chart used in schools to describe the humanist concept of evolution. It begins with an orangutan hunched over like a naked, hairy linebacker before the ball is snapped. In sequential photos the animal straightens, the arms shorten, legs moving the back upright, the mug recedes, the forehead gains prominence until the photo on the extreme right evolves into a semblance of Michelangelo’s famous “David.” The ultimate animal. But both King David and the sculptor of his statue manifest the hidden yet supreme attribute of the human being complete with soul. David’s life had a purpose far surpassing mere physical existence. He fell into sin, because he knew that a moral standard was in place. He committed adultery, and then he compounded it with murder of the man he had cuckolded. However, he repented. He did so because he was stricken to the heart by his conscience, another term left out of contemporary jargon. These actions made him a complete human being, reminding all humanity that life is more than pleasure. He had a duty to his people and to the God who created him.
Michelangelo’s entire life was a sequence of creations, turning the cosmos into beauty. God gave him the raw material and he made the most of what was at hand. Whether the Carrara marble for a David or a Pieta, or the white ceilings of the Sistine chapel, Michelangelo surrendered his life to following God’s Spirit, his muse, his inner genius and his guardian angel. He devoted himself to creating visions of loveliness embellishing what is from God’s material universe, turning matter into expressions of human greatness, inspiration, imagination and contemplation. Interesting to contemplate the progress of spiritual evolution—David among the Philistines, our Lord Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate, and Michelangelo dealing with the limits set for him by Pope Julius II.