Learning To Lose

A Reflection on the Gospel for Sunday, September 3rd, 2023:
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

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Matthew
​16.21-27

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

And Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone wants to become my follower, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit anyone to gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will anyone give in return for their life?

“For the Son of Man is to come with his Angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each according to their work.”

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

I recently heard someone explain that the purpose of the Christian life is to learn to lose well. 

For a while, in our childhood, we gain things: language, fine motor skills, self-mastery, independence, our drivers’ licenses, knowledge, friendships and relationships. But then our whole adult lives are spent losing things: we lose our self-reliance when we get married, lose our independence when we have young children to care for, we lose careers and friends and parents, we lose the cartilage in our knees and the hairs on our head, and our children move out, and our friends and spouses die, and our bodies break down, and we may even lose our memories or our minds in the end. 

And yet, we are not to say “God forbid it, Lord,” like Peter did.

Today, Jesus tells us that losing our lives should bring us immense joy, because it is only in losing the most precious things of this world that we can truly find the most precious things of heaven. When we resist our losses, when we are consumed by them, they limit us and keep us clinging to the finite things of this world. They break us. But when we accept the thousand small and large losses of our lives, with the eyes of faith, with tears, and with open arms, then we truly gain life back. We gain freedom. When we give our losses to Jesus, He is then free to transform the darkest moments into an experience of the Resurrection.

Even the crucifixion was not too horrible to be transformed into glory. On Good Friday, Peter couldn’t see that yet; but Our Lady did, standing by the foot of the cross with her Son, embracing the loss of what was most precious to her, and embracing the promise of new life gained. 

We lose things every day, big and small. For my part, my son just turned three and is beginning daycare this week, and it’s breaking my heart. For hours a day, I’ll be losing him to a classroom of kids I don’t particularly like, preschool teachers who don’t know him like I do, and an institution who can’t possibly understand him or care for him like I can.

And yet, reflecting on this Gospel, I feel the invitation to lose my own life. My heart is breaking because my son is growing up. On daycare days, he will need me less. Of course, he will always need his mother, in one sense, and I have many years until he stops needing me for the ordinary things of daily life. That day will come too. But God knows my son is taking his first steps out of our home and into the world. My son will be who he has been created to be, experience new things, and share the love that my husband and I have poured into him with those around him. If I can take up my cross and embrace this small loss in my own heart, I will be more free to see him grow and thrive. 

This is the invitation: lose your life, and gain a much fuller, richer, more free life here on earth, and eternal joy in the end.

I’ll end with a few words from the conclusion of the incredible book “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis:

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end, submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”




Becca O'Hara

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