Liberation From Your Ego

Liberation from the Ego’s Agenda

Monday, April 13, 2026

Father Richard considers how Jesus calls us to be liberated from the agendas of our inflated egos:

What was Jesus liberating us from? This probably won’t seem too different from what we would now call the ego or the false self. As Jesus put it, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Buddhists tend to describe this process with much greater clarity, but Jesus didn’t have access to psychological language. He just spoke in a straightforward way that his contemporaries could understand.  

Scholarship today is discovering a much more radical and demanding Jesus than either Catholicism or Protestantism was ever ready for. We distorted the message so it wasn’t primarily about a transformation of the ego but freedom from the body self. We largely transferred everybody’s guilt concerns toward the body. We concentrated on repressing and punishing the body, not giving the body too much pleasure, freedom, or delight. It’s not that there aren’t  issues there, but the ego, in my opinion, has gotten away scot-free in the Western church. We allowed egos to get out of control while being quite anxious to appear chaste, self-disciplined, and not too greedy. 

Christianity has largely paid little attention to the real things Jesus talked about. Instead, we tend to be preoccupied with things that Jesus never talked about. But who can reform Christianity except Jesus?

Understanding Jesus’s teachings on power is the key to reforming Christianity and other power structures:

Jesus tells his followers that they should never have what we would call dominative power. He calls it “lording it over others”: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them … but not so with you” (Matthew 20:25–26). How did so many Christians come to believe that exercising power over others is what religion is all about? There’s no indication that Jesus ever intended there to be a head church office somewhere, with upper, middle, and lower management. As a priest, I’m lower management—and even we expected the laity, the people in the pews, to be passive followers. This is so contrary to what Jesus taught and expected. He clearly gives power to people by giving them an inner authority.  

Liberation from the ego self is liberation from the world of forms and images. Jesus’s word for that was mammon: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). If we’re playing the game of appearance and power, prestige, and possessions, Jesus says we cannot know God. That’s pretty absolute! There’s a correlation between our preoccupation with image and how much—or how little—we’ve experienced the inner life.  

Jesus also liberates us from the ego self by his constant warnings against negativity and oppositional thinking. In general, his word for that liberation is forgiveness. Two thirds of Jesus’s teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. To live oppositionally is to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation.   