Dionysus on a Bike

Matthew 10:24-39 – 6/21/2026 – The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Some Scripture is straightforward to interpret or comment on. “Thou shalt not kill” for example is an easy one. At the surface it is a prohibition on taking human life, but even digging a little deeper is not that difficult. Luther’s commentary on the 10 Commandments in both the Small and Large Catechisms shows how a prohibition on taking a human life is expansive when we consider all of the things that are necessary for a human to live. Since food and shelter are things without which we will die, depriving another of them is wrong. Turning the commandment not to kill into a positive duty, it is easy to see how it might be expanded to include care for the other as a way to make sure that someone does not die unnecessarily.

Other Scripture is obscure or raises especially difficult philosophical problems meaning that interpreting those passages requires philosophical sophistication, nuance, and a sensitivity to the polyvalent nature of conceptual discourse. One of many examples of this kind of interpretive challenge include when God says that he is hardening Pharaoh’s heart so that he will not let the Hebrew people leave their slavery in Egypt. What could it mean for God to choose for a person to will evil? How are is that person responsible for their actions and attitudes when they were given to them by God? In these cases, while the world of interpretation requires philosophical tools and there are many possible interpretations that are not all consistent with one another, the task is still fairly straightforward. Humility and a sensitivity to the depth of possible interpretations mean that the interpretive work in these cases will never be finished, but what it is to give a substantive, plausible interpretation remains clear.

Finally, there are parts of scripture like today’s Gospel reading– “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” On the surface this is a straightforward teaching, holding onto one’s attachments and pursuing a good life on its own does not lead to a blessed life. Truly living means letting go of that which we hold onto as our life. Here the interpretive difficulty is not philosophical nuance but how intensely personal it is. What is “your life”? What is it to lose your life? What kind of life is gained after you lose your life? How are the lives different, the one lost and the one gained? How are they similar? What is it to lose one’s life for the sake of Jesus? The difficulty these questions present is that they are intensely personal. The answers to each of them will differ greatly from person to person so that what looks like gaining one’s life to lose it for one person might be indistinguishable from what losing life so that one gains it in Christ for another person.

Though I might be able to recognize the answer to these questions for another person after I have spent time with them and listened to them, I can really only be certain about the answers for myself. Looking at my past I can clearly see what life I was striving for, attached to, and that I pursued as if it were my salvation, as if it were the most excellent life I could live. I believed I was to teach philosophy and have the respect and lifestyle of a professor of philosophy. I thought I would give people the texts to read that would change the way they thought and lived and that I could spend my time, including the time I needed to earn a living, reading, writing about, and thinking about those same texts. Losing that life, giving it up because I saw that it was not leading to the abundant, joyful life I thought it would, was difficult and at first a grave disappointment. I gave up my life and really thought I had lost it. It was unclear to me what life I could gain after letting go of that one.

It took years of healing, self-discovery, and continuing to let go before I found life again. I found it in accepting the world as it is and my place in it. It took seeing that there is more to life than philosophical reflection or a respectable career doing something I cared about, even though it is clear that those things are still good things worth pursuing. So what changed? What does that change from gaining one’s life to losing it have to do with doing it for “Jesus’s sake”? First, though this teaching of Jesus is intensely personal, that we lose our lives for Jesus’s sake to gain life adds some grounding objectivity. Though one can lose and gain life in a multitude of ways, “Jesus’s sake” limits those ways to what is consistent with the commands to love. It’s not enough to do something explicitly in Jesus’s name. From history and our own current cultural moment, we can see many instances of people doing things—finding and losing life—invoking the name of Christ but toward evil ends that contradict the commands to love. Losing one’s life in love produces the conditions where we can accept the life given to us by Jesus, a life oriented around different values and different understandings of what is living well and being successful.

Giving up worldly success and respect, finding joy in the things that our society and its elite take little notice of, and accepting the free gift of life abundant, these are intensely personal things. I have written words seeming without end about giving up what I held most dear and finding new life in following the commands of love in community in Jesus’s name. It is difficult to communicate because I know that any reader is going to have a quite different task than I did of renunciation and affirmation oriented around love for God and others.

Losing one’s life in Christ to gain it is one of the elements of faith that is subjective in that it belongs specifically to the individual. So much of Christian life is communal and other-oriented, but here we have something that can only be recognized by oneself in oneself. To use Kierkegaard’s language, one cannot distinguish between what he calls the “knight of faith” from an ordinary person mired in their banal everyday life. What it is for one person to renounce their life and so to find it is for another to continue to be trapped in seeking one’s life for oneself. This does not prevent one from noticing the effects of this new life, but the inward relationship of desire, value, and release in favor of some sense of following Christ is truly visible only to oneself.

Further reflection and reading: There is much more to say about the relationship between individuality and the communal, public nature of the Christian life. Though the isolated, self-contained, self-sufficient individuality of liberal modernity is rejected, this does not exclude the importance of the subjective existential relationship with oneself with which modernity has wrestled. There are issues of responsibility and what we owe each other that must be taken into account as we delve into the interiority of the single soul that is one’s own. For one foundational reflection on this subjective side of faith see Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis