Every story has a main character – the protagonist – around whom the story unfolds and revolves. It is his or her thoughts and experiences that drive the narrative. All others characters, though they may be important, are really only important insofar as they relate to the central character.
In many respects, that is the nature of our lives. We are the main character in our own story, and regardless of how important another person may be, we tend to relate to them based on our concerns and not as they are in themselves . Even when a loved one dies, it is our own grief that is central to us. This is all quite natural. After all the only eyes I have to see the world are my own.
It strikes me however that Jesus is the one human being who lived and died and yet placed himself as peripheral to his story. He is the only genuinely non-self-centred person in human history. All that he said and did was for others and in response to the Father. He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t glorify himself. He didn’t look down on himself (which is but a distorted kind of self-centredness). He was entirely unselfconscious and consequently was entirely free to give and to receive.
In so many ways the invitation to Christian discipleship is an invitation to self-displacement, to a radical de-centering of self as the protagonist of our life stories. The paradox of the Christian faith is that life is found in losing it, strength found in weakness, gain is found in giving up pursuit of it.
I must confess that this is incredibly difficult in practice, regardless of how lovely it sounds in theory. Well I suppose the saying is true, everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. Yet Christianity is exactly about death – about living as though already dead, which is what Jesus himself said we are to do.
I haven’t attained this level of self – displacement yet. Maybe I never will. But occasionally, when I pause the never ending stream of thoughts and emotions of how I feel, what I think, why this one is wrong, what I want, etc., occasionally I am able to catch a glimpse of what it is to live as a side character in God’s story instead of as the protagonist of my own.
InterSection 