Earn It

Yesterday, I finally got around to watching "Saving Private Ryan." The film is deeply moving, and the ending is especially memorable.
"Earn it," are the final words of John Hamilton to Private Ryan as he lay dying.

The movie later shows Ryan in his old age, tormented by this final demand. He turns to his wife, "Am I a good man? Have I lived well? Did I earn it?"

And it struck me that the very thing that Hamilton had wanted was corrupted by his own demand.
He wanted the lives of several men who had died to save Ryan to be consummated in one life.
Ryan's life.
He wanted Private Ryan to earn something which he could not earn and made him, instead of a man who gave back to society with no restraint, a man eternally tormented by his inability to do so...

Thank the Lord that He has not asked us to earn His love or even His physical sacrifice.
He hasn't asked us to earn one another's lives either but to, with gladness and of our own choice, relinquish our lives unto each other and ultimately unto Him.
And this is not just a demand for the dying, but even more for the living. Sacrificial deaths are always preceded by sacrificial lives.

But really, there is nothing so opposite of the world's mandate to "earn" our place than God's call to die; this is even more far reaching than the aforementioned point describes.

In the course of man's life, the world's sacred song tells us to find our greatest personal happiness, survive and thrive as long as we can and our health allows and to pursue our passions for which we lust with reckless abandon.
God says, "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me."
Read the last two sentences again until you can see the direct contradictions (which I did not even attempt to articulate in my first draft). Let their implications sink in...

...But all of this is hopeful rather than despairing, because it means all we have to do is relinquish that which is so greatly over-esteemed but which is truly worthless for that which nobody desires but is actually beyond price...

Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge illustrates this far better than I:

How can I ever explain to those who insist that we must believe in the world to love it that it is because I disbelieve in the world that I love every breath I take, look forward with ever greater delight to the coming of each spring, rejoice evermore in the companionship of my fellow-humans, to no single one of whom, searching my heart, do I wish ill, and of no single one of whom do I wish to separate myself, in word or thought or deed, or in some prospect of some other existence beyond the ticking of the clocks, the vista of the hills, the bounds and dimensions of our earthly hopes and distress? To accept the world as a destination rather than a staging-post, and the experience of living in it as life's full significance, would seem to me to reduce life to something far to banal and trivial to be taken seriously or held in esteem... In other words, the Christian proposition that he who lives his life in this world shall lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will see it projected unto eternity, is for living, not dying.

-Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Chronicle 1: The Green Stick

I love pondering this quote because it is full of the life, worth and wealth of the gospel of which the New Testament implodes and of which modern apologetics is notoriously lacking. It is time that we stopped talking with such lengthy despondency about all we have had to sell or burn in order to pave the road for Christ and began talking of the precious jewel that is eternally ours.