March 4, 2012 | 8:00 a.m.

Gains and Losses

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22:1–23a
Mark 8:31–38

“For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”

Mark 8:36 (NRSV)

We ask you to create the spaces in our life
where we may ponder his suffering
and your summons for us to suffer with him,
suspecting that suffering is the only way to come to newness.
. . . So be that way of truth among us that we should not deceive ourselves.
That we shall see that loss is indeed our gain.

Walter Brueggemann
“Loss Is Indeed Our Gain”
Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

My father is a lover of stories. As a professor in the humanities, he relied on stories to teach students how to assess the meaning of life. Among the great stories he taught in the classroom, “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy was by far the story I heard most frequently referenced by him at home. Though until recently I myself had read it only once many years ago, it nevertheless comes easily and frequently to mind, especially during the season of Lent, when we, like the character of Ivan Ilych, prepare for death and in doing so take another look at life.

In this short story by Tolstoy, the main character is Ivan Ilych, a lifelong civil servant. From young adulthood into old age, Ivan Ilych sought a well-lived and pleasant life, and for him this involved a preoccupation with improving his status in society. By completely conforming himself to social and professional decorum, in time he gained more wealth, more status, and more power. It seems that nothing brought him more pleasure than to think about all he had gained over the course of his life. Sizing up Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy wrote, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

It is not until his health begins to fail him that Ivan Ilych questions for the first time who he has been and how he has lived. At the end of his life, he asks himself, “What do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you lived?” “Maybe,” he says to himself, “I did not live as I ought to have done.” “It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.” “What if my whole life has really been wrong?”

It’s not uncommon for death to be the occasion for thinking about life. Facing loss, it’s not uncommon for us to question what we had considered gain and to weigh everything again so that we might take the true measure of things.

The death of Ivan Ilych is a near-tragedy. He dies almost without making sense of what matters more and what matters less. He dies almost without recognizing that there is so much more upon which to set his mind than the things that had preoccupied his life. He dies almost without reconciling his gains and losses.

In the Gospels, we see the followers of Christ struggling to reconcile their gains and losses in the wake of Jesus’ death. We see them trying to make sense of his life in light of his death. The Gospels, at their core, are the passion narrative—the story of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. Everything else in the Gospels leads up to the last week of Jesus’ life like an extended introduction. All the stories about Jesus, what he taught and what he did, are included in the Gospels not for the sake of biography but in order to make sense of who he was in light of how he died.

In the passage we read today from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus announces to his disciples for the first time what will happen to him: the Son of Man will suffer, will be rejected, will be killed, and after three days will rise again. Two more times, in later chapters, he speaks to his disciples of his impending death. Each time they react with incomprehension. It is not because they misunderstand what he says. Mark tells us in verse 32 that Jesus speaks about these things quite openly and plainly. More likely, his disciples resist hearing what he says because they cannot yet reconcile his death with who they know him to be.

In the verses just preceding this passage, Jesus and his disciples are in a conversation about his identity. Jesus asks them, “Who do people say that I am?” After hearing the many conjectures about his identity—that Jesus is John the Baptist; that he is Elijah; that he is one of the other prophets—Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” To this Peter answers him, “You are the Messiah.”

It is no wonder that Peter reacts as he does when he hears Jesus telling them that Jesus must suffer and die. That the Messiah must suffer and die—such a notion had never occurred to them and only contradicts their expectation. And when it does come to pass, it stuns them and calls into question who they thought Jesus was.

Like the gospels, stories are often defined by their endings. Even the stories we tell about our own lives take on meaning in light of how they end. This is one conclusion that Daniel Kahneman draws from his study of how people tend to evaluate their life experiences. Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work in measuring experience. Using different tests, he has found that people evaluate their experiences based primarily on two things: the highest and lowest moments in life, which he calls peak moments, as well as how experiences end. He has found, interestingly, that all the moments of life in between the highs, lows, and the end have very little influence on how people measure their life experiences.

In his recently published book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he illustrates his point by telling a humorous story about going to the opera. Early in his days of working on the measurement of experience, Kahneman went to a performance of Verdi’s La Traviata. That opera is, in his own words,

a moving story of the love between a young aristocrat and Violetta, a woman of the demimonde. The young man’s father approaches Violetta and convinces her to give up her lover, in order to protect the honor of the family. . . . In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, Violetta pretends to reject the man she adores. She soon relapses into consumption. . . . In the final act, Violetta lies dying, surrounded by a few friends. Her beloved has been alerted and is rushing to Paris to see her. Hearing the news, she is transformed with hope and joy, but she is also deteriorating quickly.

“No matter how many times you have seen the opera,” Kahneman writes, “you are gripped by the tension and fear of the moment: Will the young lover arrive in time?” Before she dies? “He does, of course, and after ten minutes of marvelous love duets are sung, Violetta dies” (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 386–387).

On his way home from the opera, Kahneman tells us that he was nagged by a question: “Why do we care so much about those last ten minutes?” (p. 386). He realized that the emotion he felt about the lovers’ reunion would not have changed if he had learned that they actually had a week together rather than just ten minutes. If the lover had arrived too late, however, the story would have been altogether different. Kahneman uses this example to illustrate his main point: “a story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing” (p. 387). How a thing ends is often what defines how it is remembered, and this is true not only of operas, but of every story that is told, because this is how the remembering self works.

In studying the responses of people when asked to evaluate a life—either their own or someone else’s—Daniel Kahneman found the same to be true: the highs, lows, and the end matter. It is human nature to remember these things more than everything in between. Furthermore, these are the things that intuitively inform our outlook on life.

Of all the Gospels, Mark’s Gospel is the shortest. Compared to the other Gospels, it is bare bones, and so from it you can see more clearly what it was about Jesus that was so important to his earliest followers—important enough to be memorable and memorable enough to be told as a story. When you look at its structure, you find that one third of the Gospel of Mark consists of the story of how Jesus’ life ends: this is the passion narrative, the story of the last week of Jesus’ life, his suffering, his death, and his resurrection.

During the season of Lent, this is the story that the church tells. At the core of our faith, this story shapes and defines the rest of our understanding of who Jesus was and what he lived for. More than this, his death informs how we are to live our lives. To the crowd Jesus called out, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Approaching his own death then, Jesus was concerned to direct his followers on what it means to live as his disciples. He knew that discipleship would require them to suffer, and to be faithful they would need to draw upon his passion.

Despite threats to his life, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. continued to fight for the cause of civil rights throughout the United States. On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, he took stock of his own life. In the words he spoke that night, we can hear how the passion of Christ gave shape to his discipleship:

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.

And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.

So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” (Martin Luther King Jr., “The Measure of a Man,” p. 55)

Martin Luther King Jr. knew the danger to his life. He did not weigh potential gains against potential losses. Instead he took the measure of his life in the terms that Jesus set forth: the terms of discipleship.

Remembering Jesus’ passion, every generation can make sense of who they are and can discern what they are called to do. And in the end, the measure of our lives will not be a sequential account of what has occurred until our death; instead, our lives will be measured by how closely we follow Christ.