A Twilight Musing

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is common-sense advice that most financial advisors would give to their clients. “Diversify,” they would say, so that if one kind of investment fails, others could compensate.  That makes sense in the world of finance, but God invites us to do just the opposite in our approach to serving Him.  Just as Jesus sacrificed everything to fulfill God’s purposes, we His followers are invited to invest all that we have in His promise of eternal life.  The Lord’s Supper is an appropriate place to reaffirm that our commitment to God is total, even reckless in human terms, holding nothing back.

Jesus illustrates this principle of being “all in” for the Kingdom of God with two little parables.

 The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:44-46)

God’s Kingdom is depicted here as a treasure of such transcendent value as to warrant giving all one has to possess it.  In another place, Jesus seems extreme in His expectations of those who intend to follow Him:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt. 10:37-39)

But Jesus did not shrink from exemplifying what he asked of His disciples.  Paul gives us a beautiful summary of how Jesus,

though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Phil. 2:5-8)

In his turn, Paul describes how he followed the example of his Master.  Though he had a brilliant career ahead of him as a leading Pharisee when he was called by Jesus, he “suffered the loss of all things” and counted them “as rubbish, in order that [he might] gain Christ and . . . know him and the power of His resurrection” (Phil. 3:8-10).  Indeed, his commitment to Christ was so complete that his personality was merged with that of his Savior: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

That is the radical challenge we meet in the Lord’s Supper.  Jesus calls us to invest recklessly in giving all that we have and are, to be fellow heirs with Him of the Kingdom of God.  Therein lies the power of symbolically sharing in the body and blood of Christ.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.