Sacrificing For the Transcendent

Living in light of the eternal

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

(A six-minute read.)

I started going through the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible a few weeks ago and noticed something I hadn’t seen before in Jesus’s so-called “Sermon on the Mount.”

In a passage that’s pretty well-known to many Christians, Jesus tackles the issue of adultery and famously explains that adultery not only takes place when an unmarried man and woman get into bed with each other, but even when a man looks at a woman “to lust for her” (Matthew 5:28).

This idea—that “lusting” after someone is equivalent to committing adultery—has garnered a lot of attention over the years, including, perhaps most famously, then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter declaring in 1976 that he had “committed adultery many times” in his “heart.”

It’s an important and worthy (and convicting) subject in its own right, but what caught my attention about Jesus’s reflections in this section is what he says next.

He goes on to explain that, in light of this reality, one would be better off to “pluck” out his eye instead of allowing it to lead him into sin. “For,” he explains, “it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell” (v. 29).

It’s this last clause that intrigues me the most.

Essentially, Jesus—who remains a very popular figure, even in “secular” societies—points to the immanent/transcendent binary, and notes the superiority of the latter.

That is, there are goods in this life we will want to attain and possess and experience—but indulging in those things may cause us to forfeit other goods in the life to come. 

This essentially gets at what I’ve noted before. It’s that immanent/transcendent binary which philosopher Charles Taylor pointed to nearly twenty years ago, explaining how western society had transitioned from a focus on the life to come to a focus on this life.

Four hundred years ago, most people in the West worried about transcendent questions—how to please a transcendent God and make sure one was right with him.

Now, through a long series of events, most of us in the West pay little thought to questions of transcendence, but instead worry ourselves with how to attain and live “the good life” in the here and now.

We want to know what leads to “optimal human flourishing” now.

As a corollary of this latter attitude, it’s almost thought of as self-evident that the affirmation of desire—rather than its denial—is necessary for the optimal human flourishing we’re all after (the word that’s often translated “lust” in Jesus’s reflections, which seemingly has only a negative connotation in our minds, can be more broadly translated as a sort of “intense desire,” and can be seemingly more morally-neutral).

To deny one’s desires is often thought of as undermining our quest for human flourishing—and especially if we’re told that the denial of that desire may only lead to other-worldly benefits (rather than this-worldly benefits).

In other words, we can somewhat understand the wisdom of denying desire now in order to reap some sort of benefit later in this life (though even with this, most of us are either reluctant to do so, or lack the willpower to achieve it). We celebrate athletes, after all, who go through painstaking sacrifice and self-denial in this life in order to achieve some sort of temporal victory (I can thank my friend, David Hamstra, for pointing this out).

But the thought of denying desire now, in order to reap some sort of transcendent, other-worldly benefit, is almost beyond our comprehension.

And it’s sometimes even framed as the denial and denigrating of our very humanity. And those who promote such ideas are often thought of as fanatical “religious nuts” who don’t care about present “shalom.”

The problem is, in this case, we’d need to count Jesus among the fanatical “religious nuts”—that compelling, attractive, popular, love-promoting religious revolutionary that most people around the world seem to be drawn to.

Simply put, in his telling of humanity’s story, there’s not only immanent, this-worldly desires we have to consider; there’s also transcendent, other-worldly concerns that should captivate our reflections and imaginations.

There is, in other words, to use a phrase that used to be a lot more popular, a “hell to shun and a heaven to gain.”

All this reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s theology of suffering, which he spends a lot of time developing. Suffering in this life is, according to Paul, a drop in the bucket compared to the glory of eternity. We are living in an eternal story—and we should therefore orient our present lives accordingly.

As he thus explains in his second letter to the Corinthians:

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)

In other words, we’re a part of a much bigger story—a transcendent story—and everything else gets relativized in light of that.

And we should live accordingly.

Such rhetoric, as I’ve explained, is largely foreign to our enlightened, Middle Class, immanent-only, desire-affirming lives.

The idea of suffering, self-denial, and debasing our desires seems crazy and even unhealthy.

And yet it’s an idea that’s prevalent in the Scriptural story—including especially in the life and teachings of Jesus (who, for the sake of a larger transcendent end, demonstrated the ultimate act of self-denial, suffering, and sacrifice when he went to the cross).

To be clear, I don’t think such an idea should be used as a license to try to scare people into certain religious behaviors. There’s been a long and toxic history of religious people utilizing the fear of future damnation as a way to scare people into conformity now (which has caused more than a few people to conclude that the idea of “heaven” and “hell” are purely human constructs, invented as a way to compel human behavior).

Neither is it to imply that we should ever ignore the sufferings of others in the present, appealing to eternity as a sort of “get out of jail free” card. We should indeed seek to alleviate others’ present suffering where possible, working towards a better world in the here and now.

At the same time, we should always be reticent to invite other people into sacrifices which we ourselves may not need to make (it feels a little disingenuous, for example, for a person who has no appetite for sex to zealously tell other people that they have to deny their desire for it).

And yet, at the end of the day, we should ever humbly point people to the transcendent story, reminding them that whatever happens in this life isn’t the final or ultimate word—and that living a sacrificial life now will seem relatively easy when we’re sitting on the other side of eternity.

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Shawn is a pastor in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.