As Peter Rollins says, “life is not experienced. It is life that allows us to experience. We cannot see light yet it is light that allows us to see.” The completely worn out question of “what is life” has become so shallow that we never come face to face with the reality that life may be completely meaningless. In our weak moments we actually keep asking the question to avoid the answer thinking we’re being honest with ourselves. They are our weakest moments. The great sadness of our lives is that this question of our existence is asked for us by personal and social impulses. We never ask it ourselves and we never find an answer. We take shortcuts to find out who we are -shortcuts handed to us by our friends, inherited from our family, learned from our community and country, and even sold to us by corporations. Those of us who figured God out have it really easy. We can plug him into our emptiness and ignore the darkness gnawing at our souls. We can live like that and even be rewarded by all the things that have co-opted us, and taken us captive. We can continually learn who we are only in relation to them but never know ourselves as we are. Could it be true that most of our lives are rationalizations of our failure to find out who we really are? Could it be that most of our energy and effort is wasted into continually misplacing our identity into the kingdoms of this world? Could it be that all is concealed from the world by fulfilling our gods’, our societies’, and our own status quo bias?
Jesus’ claim to be the splittin’ image of God on earth is a pretty radical one considering that he not only resisted the status quo and his own selfish desires but actively challenged them. To be Christ-ian simply means forsaking absolutely everything and losing even ourselves in service to the Creator.