Since Old Testament times, the people of God have been instructed to love their neighbors as they love themselves. And how we as selves relate to others has remained a problem through the centuries. In Jesus’ dialogue with the lawyer (Luke 10:25–37), the lawyer was concerned only with himself; he sought to “justify” his trickery. And in the Good Samaritan parable, self was the obstacle for two of the characters. The priest who passed by on the other side may have been a Jericho priest on his way to his once-a-year privilege of service in the Jerusalem temple. Had he touched a dead man (and the wounded traveler may have appeared to be dead), he would have become ritually unclean. His priestly privileges, therefore, would have been jeopardized by his going over to the injured man. He was concerned mainly with himself.
The Levite in the parable, who came over to the wounded man, probably was aware of a common scheme of robbers on that notoriously dangerous road to Jerusalem. The wounded man might have been a decoy to lure him closer to concealed robbers, so he was quick to leave the scene. He, too, was thinking mainly of himself.
Jesus has called us to a discipleship of loving our neighbor, and all people in the world are our neighbors. He went further and told us what is involved: “If anyone wants to come with me, he must forget himself, carry his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34, GNB).
Just how can one “forget himself”? Most people are wrapped up in their own problems. But Christianity from the start meets a person’s fundamental need to get out of the “existential ditch.”
Forgetting self is really forgetting about our own self-image—developing a non-self-consciousness. All of us at times become introspective. We observe ourselves as if we were watching a play in which we have the leading role. We are concerned about how we appear to others. We puzzle over what we can do to move closer toward our ideal self-concept.
The Freudian school and also the more recent Transactional Analysis theory have reinforced the human tendency to concentrate on self—especially the self of the past. It’s certainly helpful to face one’s experiences candidly, to try to sort out one’s strengths and weaknesses. But when we try to analyze our past precisely, we find it can’t be done. We are too complex. Our motives and emotions are unclear, and our rationalizations cloud our evaluations. William Glasser is correct in saying, in Reality Therapy, that the issue is not why something is done but of what value is it now.
Concentration on self is a result of the Fall. C. S. Lewis in Perelandra used a mirror in the Green Lady’s hands to make this point. Satan was trying to get Eve to a point where she would become conscious of her own self and to sense herself as an independent being—apart from God. He succeeded.
What is so refreshing in becoming a Christian is that Christ gives us a way out of ourselves. We can forget self. The basis for our becoming non-self-conscious is simply that in trusting Christ’s death to pay for our failures with God, we can know we are accepted.
Parents don’t review every mistake their children make during the day and evaluate the relationship accordingly. If they are good parents, their children sense an underlying acceptance, even when they are corrected. In the same way, we become non-self-conscious when we encounter Christ. We are confronted by the Jesus of the Scriptures. We realize that he died for us while we were sinners, and from there on we are free to stop analyzing ourselves. Christ accepts us, and this is the bridge to others. On the basis of our reconciliation with God through Christ, we can cross over to our neighbor.
What does “forgetting self” mean practically? Knowing we are accepted by God, we can open ourselves to others. We can actually risk getting out of ourselves and into other people’s lives. There will be times when we reach out to others and are rejected. The person we’re trying to touch will simply not respond, or may even reject us. But we’ve got to put aside worries about being rejected. We’ve got to cross over into other’s lives.
This ability takes time. We have to be patient as God helps us to move away from our self-consciousness. “God has not yet completed the work begun in us.” Growth is the substance of our spiritual pilgrimage.
