Universal Call to Holiness
A call to holiness is, I believe, a call to know “Who I am.” It is a question that is put to every one of us at many stages of our lives, in many different ways. Somehow it is a question that is always there. Even after we have answered it several times, we do not really know the answer, because we are much more complicated than we dare to admit most of the time. We are unknown to ourselves.
“Who is the real me?” Every time we answer the question of identity we only understand part of the truth, not all of it. Part of our answer is untrue, a lie, and we believe it along with the truth. How difficult it is to know, face, and simply accept the truth about ourselves! Our “true selves” evade us, and, if we are to tell the truth, we evade our true selves as well.
Jesus wants us to know the truth about ourselves; He wants us to know our true selves. Jesus is a lover of the Truth. “Then you will learn the truth and the truth will make you free: (John 8:32). He wants us to be filled with life. “I came so that they may have life and have it to the full (John 10:10). And He knows how we can find that life. “For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it”.
Unfortunately, Christians throughout the ages have often misinterpreted Jesus’ words to mean that we most never express who we really are, our true selves. A part of the Christian tradition has taken this verse and several like it about dying to self (Galatians 2:20 and Colossians 3:10) and used them as a justification for not growing spiritually and finding our true selves at all. The point of what Jesus is saying in Matthew is that by following His say we ultimately will find our true selves. Because we human beings have a natural fear of that Truth, however – a fear based in lies we have believed about ourselves, but a real fear nonetheless – and because it is often difficult and painful to search for that Truth, we have all too easily found in Jesus’ words an excuse to avoid any effort to do so.