Pride, Ego & Anxiety

The other day I was sitting outside a coffee shop speaking to a six year old, having just finished grade 1, and now ready to be 25 so he could have his freedom, he told me. I replied to him: you might need to learn a few things between now and age 25 if you really want to be free. Like what, he said to me. And on and on the conversation went; while it was certainly funny (and tbh, a little exhaustingly tedious); one thing 6 year olds demonstrate brilliantly: they do not know what they do not know! In other words, they’re ignorant of how much there is to know about virtually everything; yet they presume they know basically everything there is to know. 

And fair enough. Six year olds still make most of their decisions on the basis of how they feel because they have neither the experience n8or the brain development to do more complex reasoning beyond how they feel about something. But as Aristotle points out in his Neomachean Ethics, “it makes no difference [in pursuing what is good for you] whether you’re actually young in age or just immature in character. What’s lacking isn’t just a matter of time. It’s about whether you live your life, and pursue the things you pursue, by your emotions. For people like that, knowing doesn’t help, just as it doesn’t help people with no self control” (NE, Penguin Classics, Book I.3, p. 3). 

We heard Aristotle’s spin on the matter of pursuing what’s good for us. Jesus nicely summarizes in one passage what it takes Aristotle an entire book to say: To what should I compare this generation? You are like children who are so emotionally driven, that you are unable to hear me no matter how I come to you. I sent my prophet John to you. He came with severity giving you ample warning that your ways are not God’s ways. He “came neither eating nor drinking, and [you said], 'He has a demon.’ Then I came to you with the completely opposite approach: in mercy, coming alongside you, eating and drinking with you, providing you with food, water, wine, full of grace I came to you and [you said] 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'” All the rescue ships I send across your tumultuous waters, you reject because you expect God to show up and fulfill your desires just how you want. 

While young children certainly have an excuse for their lack of recognizing what is good for them, Jesus makes it clear that his brothers and sisters who are Jewish or Christian, even those who are not, have no excuse for not recognizing God as their very source of being and their source of what is good: “But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.

What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for their own usually emotionally based rendering of their experiences of this life (Romans 1:20, The Message & my translation).

Jesus then says that he, who is God’s wisdom - perfect God, perfect human being, uniting and reconciling the two as God intended us to be - is vindicated in the lives of those who recognize their need for God and so willingly let go of their expectation that God will conform to them. God comes to those who lay down their own lives. Why? It’s not that God isn’t there for those who want him to conform to them. The problem isn’t on God’s side. The reason those who aren’t willing to lay down their lives and stop being led by their emotional responses don’t receive God is because they can’t see him for their Pride getting in the way.

Pride and ego: the fruit of emotional responses not well regulated by humility. When we don’t get what we want, when we want it, how we want it, the 6 year old stomps his or her feet and screams or pouts like a child who needs a parent’s reassurance; the 25, 35, 65, 85 year old, free of parental control, on the other hand, can destroy relationships, organizations, institutions, and even countries. Pride blinds us; humility receives the one who comes in humility.

Receiving Jesus and so being drawn into God’s life of gathering people to himself, is not accomplished in one moment or one decision. And it is not about you. You’re not receiving a law or a teaching: you’re receiving Jesus himself and so you’re actually stepping into a life; a life on a mission of gathering, correcting, disciplining, and renewing so that in those willing to follow, it is God who is seen. So Jesus tells us that in fact we are to become like little children in being ultimately humble, receptive and teachable; not presuming, as kids sometimes do, that we know all there is to know.

Receiving Christ begins with confession: an admission of our ignorance, our arrogance, our inability to do the good we want to do: “I do not do the good that I want to do, says Paul, but the evil that I do not want to do, that is what I’m so often tempted by, and it’s what I so often do in my pride, my fear, my ego, my anger, my arrogant, yet insecure judgment.” Wretched man that I am who will save me from this endless struggle, this anxiety I feel trying to make it in this world that seems so unlike the world God promises?

Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Come to me all you who are weary and exhausted, frustrated, sad, at the end of your rope, no longer sure why you’re here: let go, let go, let go. Stop clinging to the way your emotions cause you to create your own personal narrative of this world and allow me to draw you into the world as it is: a world being drawn together, gathered in me, to my Father and your Father.

Christ does not promise an easy life. What he promises is that if we open ourselves to him, our struggles and suffering may very well remain, but he will use these things to heal us, to allow us to receive and give love more deeply, more profoundly, more fully, to show us joy, hope, peace and love that can be seen only through grace and not with eyes that are conditioned to see things through the values and goals of this world. So yes, our suffering may remain, but in Christ, it is transformed. AMEN