Matthew 16:26
For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life?
Today’s verse more or less summarizes the entire legend of Faust. Faust, you’ll recall, sold his soul to the devil in order to get something he really wanted. People who do this sort of thing almost invariably think of themselves as pursuing an Exalted and Noble Calling for which certain … sacrifices must be made. They might even be prone to making speeches like Uncle Andrew, the wicked magician is C. S. Lewis’ _The Magician’s Nephew_: “Men like me who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.” In reality, though, people like Faust and Uncle Andrew aren’t really reaching for the heavens, they are emphatically clutching at the earth. Faust doesn’t want “hidden wisdom”: he wants gold, guns, and girls. He sells the one thing he really needs to get a thousand things he thinks he wants. Uncle Andrew too spends a lifetime exhausting himself in the pursuit of worldly wisdom and, in the end, becomes a living example of Lewis’ wonderful observation: “The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” Happily, we do not have to make Uncle Andrew’s or Faust’s mistake. For we have the holy Spirit of the one who was offered all the kingdom of the world and the glory of them and who replied, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you worship.”
