All of life, All for Jesus
“And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.”
(Colossians 1:18)
About seventy years ago Thomas Merton, a theologian, and Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish-American poet who survived the German occupation of Warsaw had a fascinating exchange about human freedom. Merton believed that humanity was experiencing "a wholesale collapse of man's capacity to love." The cause of that collapse was an obsession with personal freedom that produced both murderous totalitarian states as well as democracies that felt no obligation to alleviate suffering. Here's why that conversation matters: Christianity has the only solution to the "collapse of man's capacity to love" because it is the only believable alternative to a me-first way of life. This isn't just a philosophical question. You and I are confronted every day not with people necessarily asking for our freedom, but certainly asking for our love and care. And let's be honest, when there is only so much time and energy and love to give, sometimes giving our love away and giving our freedom away is quite literally the same thing.
Christianity says that in all things Jesus Christ must be "pre-eminent." Meaning He must be "first place." If life is to be lived properly and best it must be lived in such a way that Jesus is first place. And it means for us that in all our things, in all our living Christ must be first. In all our business deals and in all of our relationships and their complications, conflicts and resolutions. Life must be Jesus-forward. Our ethics and ambitions, whether for the corner office or the triathlete's body or the boat you own, must be consistent with a life that honors Jesus with our first fruits: our time, our treasure, our talents, our hopes and dreams.
A person might think, well this is completely at odds with being human! Who would put themselves down the priorities list without being in some way lessened by it? Can’t religion occupy one part of a life that is well-directed by our own wits and good sense? If God loves me wouldn’t he want me to live free? And that’s the issue isn’t it? Does God want me to live free of any demand but those I place on myself? The Bible is clear that choosing to be free from Jesus in first place is not the choice to be free at all. There's also a growing challenge among non-theologians to the idea that individualism produces personal freedom. Instead this self-first life has led to more conflict between competing ideas of personal freedom. If all of us are seeking our own best life what are the chances that those visions of the good will be compatible with one another? Follow your heart and it will take you right into the frustrating desires of someone else's heart. Colossians 1 says that what is needed, instead, is the freedom to pursue a vision for human life so uniquely good and stable that we can give up our own insistence on first-place in order to possess it. That is, of course, to have Jesus himself as first-place, or "preeminent."
Are we caring for ourselves if a self-first life denies Jesus his "preeminence"? Not according to the central claim of Christianity: that there is only one way to truth and life and that way is through Jesus. In fact, you could say that Jesus’ incompatibility with a self-centered life, or living on the margins of our lives, is actually an apologetic in Christianity's favor. Human beings ordinarily produce gods who can be controlled by being well-behaved or by giving enough good works or treasure to keep them us in their good graces while maintaining our freedom to live a self-first life. But Jesus does not allow himself to be managed that way which is part of the reason why poets keep writing about Him and musicians sing about him and philosophers wrestle with his unique hold upon the human mind and heart so many generations later. He must be preeminent to be worthy of our fascination with him.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, famously said this about Jesus having first place:
“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool; you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Reject his first-place-ness because you're not sure you can believe in Him and you lose a powerful argument for his existence. Had we made him ourselves we would have made him less demanding. The bigger Jesus is the more we can live all of life all for Jesus. It won't be easy for us to repent of our self-first lives. But we can ask for help. May he, from his preeminence, give us all the grace we need. In all things may he be first so that we can be free at last.