He Lays Down His Life

He Lays Down His Life.  A gnarly debate rages about the specific composition of a human being. Long before Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung disagreed about the id, ego, and superego, Plato and Aristotle famously wrangled over interaction of the body, soul, and spirit. Similarly, C. S. Lewis enthusiasts cannot curb the general population from ascribing to Lewis the quote, without any proper citation, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” Theologians, too, square off against each other over tripartite vs. bipartite anthropology, humans having three parts (body, soul, and spirit) or two parts (material and immaterial). While that multidimensional debate will endure past this 500-words-or-less devotional, it is interesting and insightful to notice that Jesus’ death involved all three of those terms: body (soma), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma).

Repeatedly, Jesus foretold the disciples that he must suffer and die physically (Matt. 16:21; Mark 8:31; Luke 9:22). “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up … but he was speaking about the temple of his body” (John 2:19, 21), his soma, his skin-suit. Jesus said from the cross, “It is finished,” and he “gave up his spirit” (John 19:30), his pneuma, life-breath. Jesus also anticipated his psychological death: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). That which the Good Shepherd lays down is his psyche. Psyche denotes the fullness of one’s personality, the same word Jesus uses at Gethsemane: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38). At the cross, Jesus lays down his individual personhood: mind, emotions, heart, will, passion, even his reputation.

Body is easy to differentiate but soul and spirit legitimately overlap most of the time in Scripture. In those few times when they are distinguishable from each other, the soul is the self, the core of one’s identity that exists either at enmity with God or in fellowship with God. The spirit, however, is the animating power that God breathes into the nostrils of humans (Gen. 2:7). Thus, the human spirit comes from God, whereas the human soul relates to God.

A closely related third term for life, zoë, brings us back to the Good Shepherd. Zoë means eternal life. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10), which is the same term Jesus uses of his divinity, “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25) and “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). It is important to understand that Jesus did not lose his zoë-life at death, because he is the zoë-life. In his divinity, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and forever” (Heb. 13:8). In his humanity, his body (soma) died, he laid down his human self (psyche), he gave up his human spirit (pneuma). At his bodily resurrection, he built up that which was destroyed (soma), he took up again that which he laid down (psyche), and he received back that which he gave up (pneuma). His material and immaterial humanity entirely died, was buried, and rose up again.