Eventide & Altar

Nahum's oracle over Nineveh is one of the most graphic in the prophetic books - heaping corpses, bodies to stumble over, stripped and cast away, abandoned. He is describing the end of an empire that accumulated everything on the principle that accumulation was the point. The city thought it was winning. At the end of the chapter, it is rubble.

You have probably watched enough versions of this play out - in public life, in the lives of people you knew, in the small accumulation strategies that seemed rational at the time - to recognize what Nahum is describing. The life built on protecting and increasing what you have eventually runs out of something it cannot replace. The Deuteronomy psalm puts it plainly: see now that I alone am God. Nothing else lasts. No other source of security outlasts the one who made everything.

Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it - Jesus says this to ordinary disciples, not martyrs. The self that is protected and managed toward its own continuation is not the self that gets found. The self that is spent in following is the one that turns up again in the finding.

This teaching sits differently at the end of a long life than it does at the beginning. You have probably spent yourself in the following - on children, on work done faithfully, on marriages that cost something, on people who needed things and you gave them. That giving, which may not have felt heroic, is what this verse is describing. The finding is real.

The Sorrowful Mysteries. The cross he asked his disciples to take up is the one he himself carried. Pray these as the path that precedes the finding, not as suffering for its own sake. Pray them for whoever in your life is in the carrying, not yet at the finding.

• In gratitude for what was lost in following - the things given away that could not be recovered and that turned out to be the finding - we pray to the Lord.
• For those in the middle of the losing right now, unable yet to see the finding on the other side, that they would hold to the promise without requiring proof, we pray to the Lord.
• For those tempted to save their lives by protecting what they have at the cost of following further - that the Nineveh image would clarify what that strategy produces, we pray to the Lord.

Name one thing you have lost in the course of following Jesus - given away, relinquished, let go - and then, looking back, say honestly whether the losing produced anything on the other side. If yes: hold that as evidence that the mechanics work. If not yet: hold it as the ongoing promise that the finding is still coming.