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Are we Sisyphus?

Writer's picture: Justin Scoggins, Th.D.Justin Scoggins, Th.D.

There is a story that has stuck with me for years. I was required to read the Odyssey by Homer my junior year of high school, there was a specific character that struck me. Sisyphus was the type of character that seemed to align with how I was viewing life at the time. He was tenacious and a trickster. He cheated death and angered the gods. Having died a second and final time, he was punished by rolling a large stone up a hill, only for it to fall down the other side, only for him to roll it back up again. This was his eternity. It was a nod to the monotony of life. The purposelessness of it all. My friend, Daniel Kent, did a great write-up a few years back about Sisyphus and Sarte (https://reknew.org/2018/07/can-life-have-meaning-without-god/).

It wouldn’t be until I came across an essay by Albert Camus on Sisyphus that I truly started to understand why I found myself in him. In this essay, Camus essentially argues that life is meaningless, and we try to give meaning and purpose to meaninglessness through absurdity in trying to create order or find religion. According to Camus, if life has no meaning, no identity, no purpose; we could first relish in the absurdity of it all and then choose to celebrate and live a life full of purpose that we create ourselves. It is a cheerful stance in the face of emptiness that we can have meaning, purpose, and identity.

It clicked for me. My struggles and questions all pointed to the fact that nothing was worth meaning in this life. Like Sisyphus, I was doomed to roll this stone of life up a hill only for it to fall down the other side. Life was utterly pointless. However, I could construct and create a life full of purpose and meaning based on my own comprehension and whatever brought me joy. With sweat beading on my brow, my hands shaking and my legs giving out, I could roll this stone as long as I had a manufactured purpose behind it. Every step up would be full of purpose. I could choose how I wanted to roll the stone. I could be free to be a unique individual while rolling the stone. As my feet would dig into the dirt and my arms and body pushed, I could feel myself creating something worthwhile. My politics and my cultural surroundings can help form my identity. They can construct ‘who I am’. This is me, rolling this stone. Uniquely me on this absurd quest. As long as I focused on my stone, I could shape myself around it. I could find myself in the moments of seeing and touching. My sense of being was cast onto how well, or however, I chose to roll this stone. I was completely and totally encapsulated by my stone. My stone was the only stone that mattered. It controlled me. Although, I knew that it would reach a point and roll down again, only for me to have to regroup and start over. It didn’t matter, all I had was my stone and how I was choosing to roll it. However true in fantasy, it is false. We are free by our creation. Sister Nona writes: “Our image and likeness are distinguished. By creation, we have the first and by our free choice we build the second.”We build throughout our lifetime, it’s just a question of what we are building.

This is the story of our culture today. In some ways, we are all Sisyphus. The major dilemma that we face is that there is this undercurrent of meaninglessness with which the tides of society ebb and flow. Individuals are so captured by their own stones and how they can best create their rolling technique that we forget there is nothing of substance in the rolling or the stone. Yet we persist. We are influenced by influencers. We are divided and siloed. Our stone and our way of rolling specifically is unique, however, in our minds, it is the best. We strive to create purpose with the most egregious of tools and we try to find ourselves in our own creations. Eventually, however, we are faced with the truth of nihilism. Our stones become material purposes and we strive for the rational over and above anything else. We reject everything but what science can prove and in proving something we are left with a large pile of nothing to help us roll the stone. Nothing is all we have, and nothing becomes our purpose and our meaning. And why not? If nothing is all we have to strive for, then the purpose we craft can be a beautiful nothing while we are here on this earth. The nothingness of today, of our human selves, has spurred rises in narcissism, individualism, and segregation. We are apart on all sides, rolling our stones only for them to come crashing down on the other side.

Who are we, if not some modern version of Sisyphus? Actually, we are mysterious and known beings instead. Luke Bell writes:

“The mystery of identity is the mystery of God. In him, identity is both absolute oneness and absolute difference. He is completely the same and completely different, the two characteristics that identity denotes. The mystery of His identity lies like a mist over creation. Everything in it is the same in having being. Without identity in the sense of sameness, nothing can have an identity in the sense of being different. Having the same being enables difference. The human heart, the heart of creation, longs to belong and longs to be different. It longs for identity, an identity that is rooted in a shared life and identity that marks the special uniqueness of the individual. This longing for a stable identity, now crying out in our world with an almost anguished plangency, is at root a longing for God.”

Who we are is first and foremost discovered in who God is. Our desires, our longings, and our behaviors are a direct reflection of whose image we are created in. While we can posture and strive to create our own identity, apart from God, we will never truly know who we are. The moment we harness this realization, our world, and our story begin to shift and change, much like my own. While we sense that something is ‘off’ we don’t fully grasp the why until we see a God who made us. We will continue to strive and fashion stones and hills that are ultimately meaningless for the sake of fabricating purposes. Understanding that we are made in the image of God gives us a root to build from. Like a strong tree, the roots take the nutrients and water to the rest of the organism. Once we find ourselves and our identity in Him, we can grow as strong individual trees. At our base, we are from Him. Being from Him we can identify with Him and His story for us and for creation.

There is a special revealing that takes place once we know foundationally, who we are. In some ways, we can chisel away our stone and flatten out our hill. While we may be faced with something still rather absurd, there is this change in undercurrent that maybe, just maybe, there is meaning and purpose behind this life. As we step away from identifying with the story of Sisyphus and find our true identity in God and his story, we start to see the unraveling of our core dilemma and find who we truly are. When we finally see God revealed in Christ, we gain more contentment. Knowing that in his humanity we find our own. What is true of Christ is true of us. We are hidden with Christ in God. We are seated next to the Father. We abide with Him there and He, in turn, abides with us here. In Christ, there is oneness and identity that is unique for us all because we are all One with the Father in the Spirit. Instead of being our own little gods, we find ourselves with a God who is with us. Loneliness doesn’t mean the same as it once did. Purpose and meaning are now something that we don’t have to fabricate, rather they are things that are endowed to us as bearers of the divine image. There is no striving that has to take place to create something as substantial as purpose and meaning because it has been freely given to us. So unlike Sisyphus, we can finally break our stones and flatten our hills, because we can see ourselves and know ourselves just as God sees and knows us in Christ.

But there is need for Sisyphus still. There is yet some good to the story that offers a juxtaposition to Christ. There is optimism within the pagan literature that drives us to see the more beautiful, true, and good nature of Christ. While Christ may allow us to destroy our stones and flatten our hills, we tend to walk on the same trodden path. We have found out who we are, but we are still creatures of habit. The rock and hill are fresh, and the path is what we know. How are we changed and brought to the right relationship? How are we able to escape the worn path?

Look for the paradoxes, of course. Scripture is rife with these in connection with who we are and for help in solving our problems. We are to lose ourselves to find ourselves, be last to be first, be the least to be the greatest, and see victory in the defeat of the cross. The paradoxical nature of our existence is only bolstered by the truth revealed in Christ. The difference is that if we follow the paradoxes of Christ, we are restored and saved from ourselves. When we truly lose ourselves in Him, we truly find ourselves. When we desire to serve others at the expense of ourselves and put them before us, we are lifted high. When we act from humility and meekness, great is our reward. And perhaps the most disgustingly beautiful event in history, when Christ is bloodied and crucified, we are victors and joint heirs with Him.

In Genesis 15 we see that this is nothing of our own doing. God is in covenant with Abram on his own behalf. A smoking pot and flaming torch form the covenant with us, again on our behalf. In breaking our covenant through a million acts of what Luther calls cervum meum (selfishness) we put God on the hook to honor his covenant with us. What we see on the cross, what we experience when we identify with the story, is the completion (tetelestai) of the covenant promise that was made. Once and for all and for all people at one time, Christ says ‘It is finished’. At this moment, we are saved. For all time, we are saved from ourselves.

The act of getting out of our trench and releasing our stone and hill is how we are restored and it is an act of grace on God’s part, through Christ. There is a beautiful word in scripture that is highlighted around the Eucharist. That word is anamnesis. It is a word that is founded in the retelling of the story, a recalling of things that have happened. As we identify ourselves in the story and come to an honest confrontation of our dilemma, we can retell the story of the cross in how we live. Being put back to rights with God in Christ, we recall the stone, the hill, and the trodden path. In recalling these things, we retell what the work of the cross has done for us in how we never again pick up our rocks, rebuild our hills, or fall back into the trench. A change has occurred because we have not only seen who we are but the problem we have created has been solved. Purpose and meaning are now found, not in some austere abstraction of philosophical thought and self-fabrication, but they are found uniquely, in the person and work of Christ. We don’t have to recreate what has already been made for us, we just have to get off of our own paths and (paradoxically) die to ourselves so that we can truly live. While Sisyphus tried to cheat death, Christ has overcome it thus releasing us from the absurd tasks of a meaningless life.

The divine act of restoration and salvation looks a lot like getting rid of our own stone and hill and realizing that the stone has been rolled away for us and that on a hill called Golgotha, God in Christ loved us to the uttermost. That is who we are in the face of our dilemma. We are His. Once we can come to terms with this, we are free to fulfill the purpose and meaning of our lives constrained by the story of Christ and made in his image. Sweet and Beck write about Barthes studium (education that allows discovery) and punctum (the object that jumps out at the viewer):

“You can’t have punctum without studium. Studium is the canvas that releases the spark of punctum. Punctum adds love and excitement to studium’s liking and interest. The studium of the context is the facts and features of the image. The punctum of the context is the magic and mystery, the awe and the wonder, that bring studium to life.”

The more we learn of ourselves, we find the object of our desires in Christ. Like Sisyphus, he jumps off the page, but Christ is speaking of something truer about our existence and experience. We move from fabricating our story to finding our place in the story of Creation. We can find true freedom with him. In this freedom, we can be fully human as God is human. We can reject the identity of Sisyphus and his eternity by embracing the eternal identity Christ has for us today. We can be restored in a relationship and saved from ourselves. Christ is the only true story that we have.





Herrison, Nona V. God’s Many Splendored Image. Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation. Baker Academic. Grand Rapids, MI. Kindle Version. Pg. 68.

McGilchrist, Ian. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.Yale University Press. 2019. Pg. 331.

Bell, Luke. The Mystery of Identity. Angelico Press. Brooklyn, NY. 2022. Pg. 7-8.

Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and Desire for God. A Study of Monastic Culture. Fordham University press. 1971. Pg. 116.

Beck, Michael and Sweet, Leonard. Contextual Intelligence: Unlocking the Ancient Secret to Mission on the Front Lines. Higherlife Developme Herrison, Nona V. God’s Many Splendored Image. Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation. Baker Academic. Grand Rapids, MI. Kindle Version. Pg. 68. McGilchrist, Ian. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press. 2019. Pg. 331. Bell, Luke. The Mystery of Identity. Angelico Press. Brooklyn, NY. 2022. Pg. 7-8. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and Desire for God. A Study of Monastic Culture. Fordham University press. 1971. Pg. 116. Beck, Michael and Sweet, Leonard. Contextual Intelligence: Unlocking the Ancient Secret to Mission on the Front Lines. Higherlife Development Services, Inc. Oviedo, FL. 2020. Pg. 184.

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Artwork credit: The Last Supper, Sadao Watanabe ,1977

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