The Death of the Ego and Living for the Lord
3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2025
Sunday January 25, 2025
My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
The poet, A.E. Housman, observed, “the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.” You might think that a cynical observation. However, I have only to look at my own examination of conscience to know that what he says is accurate, even as acknowledging it is uncomfortable.
Should we be humble enough to accept the possibility there is a whiff of truth to Housman’s observation, a more penetrating question may be asked: why is it the case that the love of truth is the faintest of all human passions? Like most deep questions there are, no doubt, many reasons. However, I think the issue of ego, and the ego’s preferential option for its comfort, is a wet blanket smothering the passion for truth.
When we hear and contemplate notions like we prayed in the Psalm, “the law of the Lord is perfect” and “the precepts of the Lord are right” and “the fear of the Lord is pure”, I do not think comfort is what we immediately experience. Rather, I think we sense a challenge to our ego, to our conception of things, and to our sense of personal liberty. Further, we note the Lord and His sovereignty is prior to us, and that sovereignty suggests the Lord and His precepts take precedence over our ego and its manifestations. Unlike Theophilus mentioned in the Holy Gospel, we may struggle to “realize the certainty of the teachings (we) have received.”
That wobbling certainty we may experience about the teachings we have received is not surprising. Most of modern life, our modern ways of being and perceiving, and our contemporary cultural systems encode anti-theism, materialistic atheism, anti-Catholicism, and a general sense of “nothing really matters.” Therein lies a few of the great spiritual challenges to us as disciples of Jesus Christ in our time.
If, however, we are sincere about what we prayed in our opening prayer, “Almighty, ever-living God, direct our actions according to YOUR good pleasure” we then understand a certain amount of self-will must be surrendered to Jesus and His way. This necessarily entails something like a death of the ego. We understand this surrender and death of the ego to be obedience, leading to conversion. Not only are these not popular considerations in a society constructed according to the ego machine and the pursuit of comfort, but it is also a hard grace. It is something very difficult to do. Only grace makes it possible.
The hardest part of death, be that of the ego, and of our earthly life, is giving everything up. We all so very carefully construct our egos from childhood right up to the present moment. We fill our inner lives and our inner monologue with loud chatter, and we insist on control. For us to plumb the depths of what it means to experience the word of the Lord as Spirit and life, our ego must be stripped away completely. This is the only way to achieve a grace-filled transformation in the Spirit, living with an unshakeable confidence that the decrees of the Lord are trustworthy.
It is quite disorienting to come face to face with the clarion call of Jesus Christ to move out of ourselves, into Christ, and to love others in Christ, all with an undivided heart. This clarion call is the total opposite of that voiced by the world.
The Gospel call to us is this:
“None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s (Rom 14: 7-8). Life and death—the greatest contradiction ever present in humans has been overcome. Now, the radical contradiction is no longer between living and dying, but between ‘living for the Lord’ and ‘living for oneself.’ Living for oneself is the new name for death.”[1]
If we have had even just a little taste of this spiritual battle for deeper communion with the Lord, of laboring to live for the Lord, over and against the force of our ego, we can begin to perceive more deeply the force of what Jesus proclaims:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free…”
Ego always makes us a slave to me, myself, and I, fashioning for myself the shackles with which I bind myself. The forces, traditionally summed up as the world, the flesh, and the devil, operate in and through our egos. Those forces keep us poor in the gifts of the spirit, hold us captive to ourselves, keep us oppressed by alienation from God, and blind us to God’s Presence and His Truth. When we are graced, even a little bit, to see these forces for what they are, our liberation by grace has begun! This is the good news! This is what it means to experience the words of the Lord as Spirit and life!
So, just what is the liberty and the freedom which communion with Jesus brings? Well, it is definitely NOT the false liberty the world proposes to give, which is license. As the late Pope Benedict XVI reflected in his profound book, Jesus of Nazareth:
“Jesus’ freedom is not the freedom of the liberal. It is the freedom of the Son, and thus the freedom of the truly devout person. As Son, Jesus brings a new freedom: not the freedom of someone with no obligations, but the freedom of someone totally united with the Father’s will, someone who helps mankind to attain the freedom of inner oneness with God.”
You see, our ego’s, untutored by truth and distanced from grace, allow us to see only ourselves, and a false version of ourselves at that. Consequently, we tend to seek license to do as we wish. However, if we have been grasped by Jesus Christ, tutored by His truth, and touched by His grace and life we can truly see and be truly free. Free for what is good, true, and beautiful; free for what is eternal, for God.
What is the actual content and substance of those words of Spirit and life? What does Jesus bring to us in our encounter with Him in Word, Sacrament, and Church? Well, the brilliant and holy Pope Benedict comes yet again to the aid of our understanding:
“What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought? The answer is very simple: God. He has brought God. He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets…. He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope, and love.”[2]
Jesus has brought us God! Jesus has brought us God because He is God who is also man! God in the flesh! Now, to grasp the power of this we must grapple with the tension inherent in this union between the divine and the human, always remembering the divine-God-is superior. God is the highest order, which both elevates and illuminates the lower order, which is the human. As the French Christian thinker, Gustave Thibon has noted, “It is an elementary Christian truth that the smallest degree of grace surpasses in worth and dignity the highest degree of nature: as (Blaise) Pascal said, it is of a totally different order.”
It is within that “totally different order”-the totally other order of God, which Jesus through His becoming man (the Incarnation), in sending us the Holy Spirit (Pentecost), and vivifying us with the Word and Sacrament-in which we seek to be made holy, sharers of the Divine life! It is the order of God in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that overcomes our egos, transforming us, and lifting us up to the Lord! That is why we pray, “grant…almighty God, that, receiving the grace by which you bring us to new life, we may always glory in your gift.”
We cannot say it too often-the gift is the gift of Himself, the glorified Christ, who is our way, truth, and life. Because the Psalmist beckons us to contemplate “your words, Lord, are Spirit and life” it is correct to think our worship is seeking to push us and pull us beyond the realm of the ego and into both the deeper and higher realm of Holy Communion within the very inner life of God. This realm accessed by the gracious gift and revelation of Jesus Christ. It is our acceptance of this gracious gift that can and will increase our passion for the truth-the truth of the God who is eternal, divine love.
Let us look toward the Lord and be radiant, for in Christ we obtain our true liberation; through the Holy Spirit we receive eternal sight via eternal light; and we receive the lasting riches of divine life from Him who is our origin, our dignity, and our destiny!
O my Divine Savior, transform me into yourself.
May my hands be the hands of Jesus.
May my tongue be the tongue of Jesus,
Grant that every faculty of my body may serve only to glorify you.
Above all, transform my soul and all its powers,
so that my memory, my will and my affections
may be the memory, the will and the affections of Jesus.
I pray you to destroy in me all that is not you.
Grant that I may live but in you and for you,
and that I may truly say with St. Paul:
“I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).[3]
[1] Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, The Power of the Cross.
[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.
[3] Prayer of St. John Gabriel Perboyre, CM.