new creation « Ed's Slipper

For about as long as I can remember, I’ve been a student. High school, then undergraduate, and so on and so forth until the PhD. There hasn’t been much of a respite, either: rather than a clean cut-off between my Masters and my PhD; or between my PhD and the start of my teaching life, there was an overlap where I was juggling both at once.

And now it is over. I passed the final piece of examination last Thursday – and now, beyond the graduation ceremony and (probably) some paperwork, it is finished. And I find it oddly weird – to not consider myself as a student any longer.

transitions

I won’t say I miss it. The whole research process is not one I have found particularly enjoyable. By the fourth year of the PhD, I couldn’t wait for it all to be over. But at the same time, it was familiar: not necessarily comfortable, but at least safe and predictable. And so, the closer I got to the Viva (examination) date, the less I was looking forward to it – not out of fear of failing, I knew my stuff; but because I knew about being a PhD student.

Procrastination, not of the task, but of the reward that marks the end of the task. We all do that sometimes: finishing up an essay when you’ve done all the reading, getting a house when you’ve already worked to be able to afford it, etc.

Israel in exile reacted in much the same way – they delayed getting their inheritance. Never mind that they had traveled in the wilderness for many years, and toiled hard towards that inheritance. Never mind that this was a land of plenty, ripe for the taking. No, Israel was procrastinating not the task – that was done – but the reward itself.

I never fully got why. But here’s what I now think: wandering tribes in exile, that’s an identity. That gives us something to moan about (maybe the Hebrews were somewhat British) And it’s one we’re used to. This new freedom and land-ownership, that’s good, yes, but we’re not used to that. So, yeah, we want it, but we’ll only get around to it a bit later.

Silly, eh?

Shift forward to the New Covenant. We know our identities as sinners. We sometimes hide from it, we sure don’t like it. But we’re not always ready to go and claim our inheritance – that of repentance and redemption. We’re slow, not necessarily because we don’t realise that we can claim it, but because we’re not told enough to stop delaying it.

So stop delaying it. And claim what is yours: new life.

Some passages in the Bible are downright obscure. Some others are understood readily enough, but stop making sense when you start poking them around. But generally, that poking around is worth it because those verses point to deeper truths relevant to larger swathes of our identity. In Luke 17, we find such a passage:

Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.

Luke 17:33 (NIV)

newlife

Photo: Pepsiline, under CC License

Once you’ve got your head around the apparent contradiction that keeping implies not keeping and conversely, it seems easy enough – especially in the context of the story of Lot: it is impossible to hold on to our earthly selves, we do not have the strength to do so ourselves, etc.

All this is true, but it only covers the first part of that verse. If we try to keep our life, we will lose it, probably by chasing after too many idols. But what about the second part?

Whoever loses their life will preserve it.

The easy answer is to say that in dying to our old selves, we are new creations and gain eternal life. This spiritual death and rebirth, surely, is what Jesus is talking about. It is true that we are new creations, dead to our previous selves. But here, Jesus makes a bolder claim. He doesn’t say that “Whoever loses their life will have eternal life” or that “Whoever loses their life will gain a new life”, he says that the same life that we had will remain ours.

How can that be so? How can we be new creations and preserve our life? The story told earlier in the chapter illustrates this. Jesus is at the border between Samaria and Galilee and sees ten lepers – that’s the only way in which they are described. Leprosy is uncleanness; sinfulness even. Then Jesus heals them, and only one of them comes back and we hear at that stage only that he was a Samaritan.

Rid of the uncleanness, rid of the sinfulness, the Samaritan’s true identity can live and breathe. The other ones who did not come back to thank Jesus are probably considered simply ex-lepers, seen as what they are not. Their identity is defined by their sin, albeit negatively.

Let us grasp this: the new creation that we become when we stop trying to grasp our identity is the continuity of our identity. Rid of the uncleanness, but still deeply and fundamentally us. The difference between Greek and Jew, or between any other identities we had before turning to Christ, is worth nothing because we are in Christ: we have lost our drive to grasp it; but those identities are still part of us. Only sin is gone.

This means that the new creations that we are should not discard or reject the old selves, because they are part of who we are. On the contrary, we should accept them as part of our identities, rejecting only the leprosy. Born again, yes, but the new life is in the continuity of the old life.

Ed's Slipper

About predestination and smaller matters

new creation

Transitions

A life lost for a life gained