I Am Not My Own

What is your only comfort in life and in death? 

That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death

— to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.   

Question 1 from the Heidelberg Catechism

I was eager to see the city of Heidelberg because my favorite confession of the Presbyterian Church was written there in 1563. The catechism is a series of 52 questions and answers (one for each week of the year) that teaches the foundations of the Reformed faith.

Mirathratic bull sacrifice, Heidelberg 

The city is ripe with history. Evidence of prehistoric humans was found near Heidelberg in the municipality of Mauer. The Celts founded a more permanent settlement around 500 BCE with a fortified double-ring wall. During the 1st to 3rd centuries, the Romans arrived. With them came the Mithras mystery cult. A super-secret religion that only admitted men, the central ritual was a bull sacrificed as a way of cleansing the world of sin. Given the parallels to Christ’s salvation through his sacrifice on the cross, it is no surprise that the early Christians were often mistaken for adherents of Mithraism. 

Heidelberg Castle

By the late 9th century, the first Christian monastery was founded. By the 13th century, the magnificent Heidelberg Castle was built and the town began to take shape with a church serving as host to a central market square. In 1386, the oldest university in Germany was founded. This city of learning readily embraced the reformed teaching of Martin Luther and then incorporated the teaching of John Calvin. 

Walking on the well-worn cobblestone streets, I wondered what it must have been like in Luther’s day. Certainly, the past had influenced the people of this ancient city, who would have been Catholics by religion. How liberating it must have been to claim God’s grace alone as the source of salvation. They didn’t belong to the government or the church, but, as the Catechism proclaims, they belonged solely to Christ. 

  

To say, “I am not my own,” is to embrace the most profound truth of identity: that we are held, loved, and secured not by our strength, our bank accounts, our ethnic and national identity, but by Christ. The world may want us to hustle for worthiness. But the gospel says: YOU belong!

In my church, our membership ritual goes like this: “Because you belong to Christ, you belong to us and we belong to you.” Anointed with the sign of the cross on the person’s forehead, the promise is sealed in memory – theirs and ours – a reminder of our core identity.

Marking us as his own, Christ sets us free—not to escape the world, but to engage it with courage, with justice, and with compassionate love. To belong to Jesus is not merely a comfort for dying, but a summons for living. That summons is a call to affirm the worth of every person, for all have been created in God's image.  No one is excluded. 

So maybe the question is not only what gives us comfort, but what gives us courage. And the answer, beautifully, is the same: that we are not our own. We are Christ’s.  

sign outside the church in Heidelberg