Canter Bridge

Apart from the fresh angle of view that faith in Christ provides, it is almost impossible adequately to discount human achievement and—more importantly—to abandon self-evaluation that employs such ‘success’.

The apostle Paul could, for the sake of his argument, step back into the arena of conventional mathematics. Writing to his friends at Philippi, he could add up the receipts that genealogy and long enterprise had scattered on the floor around his feet and acknowledge his own formidable ranking according to that now alien system of measurement.

Yet it was all loss to him insofar as it oriented his present and future life in a direction other than Christ, the ‘fellowship of his sufferings’, and the resurrection from death of which Jesus had become for Paul the exemplar:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Though the gain comes at some momentary, albeit intense, pain, the ‘rubbishing’ of our human achievement and the embrace of a new identity in which it is foolishness to present ourselves to self and others by its criteria brings deepest liberation.

Liberation from the sheer, desperate weight of it. Liberation from the deathly effort at self-perfection. Liberation, even, from death’s cackling grip.

It is a profoundly pleasant thing to rest in the identity that comes from faith in Christ, who has gone before, done all, reframed all, outwitted and outpowered death when all that we can do is nothing.