Gains and Losses

Brian Emmet

What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? (Matthew 16:26)

Red Letters: To gain the whole world sounds pretty nice, right? Just think of it: absolute power, total control, being the center around which everything revolves. All that wealth and attention flowing your way! You determine what is right and wrong, your word alone distinguishes truth from error. How great would that be!

Watch out, Jesus warns. The price of world-gaining is higher than you know – because the world is not yours or ours to gain. Our world-gaining attempts will never actually deliver the world to us, and the price we will pay in trying will not be measured in dollars and cents or time and effort. The price will be our souls.

So don’t sell yourself short and please do not sell yourself out. To lose your soul costs you absolutely everything.

And the drive to gain the whole world while losing our souls can apply to nations as well as individuals.

We humans have been trying various gain-the-world strategies since the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve tried the steal-it approach, and it worked out very poorly for them (and all the rest of us with them). Pride, greed, lust and anger are some of the ways we attempt to achieve control and concentrate our personal power.

Nations and empires have their own world-gaining strategies. Basically, they are all forms of pride, greed, lust and anger scaled up to a national level: bigger armies, better weapons, economic domination, espionage, threats and bullying, “charm offensives” masking predatory intent, lopsided “deals” imposed by force and all the rest.

The problem with all this, Jesus says, is that all these supposed power-gains cost you a chunk of your soul. You may gain some measure of external wealth and power while being relentlessly hollowed out on the inside. You imagine yourself becoming more and more; actually, you are becoming less and less. Goes for people, goes for nations, too.

Red Lines: MAGA is a “gain the world” promise, but a false one. For those of us who are Christians, our goal has never been to gain the world, because the world has never been ours to gain. God never asked humanity to “gain the world,” but rather graciously gives the world to us as a gift, and asks us to take care of it in the ways God intends.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that MAGA promises a “greatness” it will never deliver on, because it cannot do so. In God’s eyes, a truly “great” nation is not characterized by the mendacity, overt corruption, hypocrisy, injustice, lawlessness, bullying and cruelty that more and more characterize the actions of the Trump administration.

The more we empower MAGA, the more the soul of our nation gets hollowed out. The more we look to President Trump or any other President or party, to “save” us, to “make us great again,” to “gain the world for us,” the more our own souls get hollowed out.

To lose your soul, Jesus says, is to lose absolutely everything. All the power and wealth of the whole world will never be enough to buy back your soul. The supposed (and illusory) gain is never worth the actual price.

The same goes for nations: to lose our soul is to lose absolutely everything. This is the danger we face today.

In God’s eyes, souls are the most precious thing about a person or a nation. President Trump promises is to make America great again, and the cost to our souls, both personally and nationally, be damned.

And that, said Jesus, is precisely the problem.