Christianity is a religion of paradox: one God, three divine persons; Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human; Mary, virgin and mother, to name just those that constitute our faith at its most fundamental. Turning to Jesus’ teachings: you win by losing; you can only have it all if you give it all away.
What is a paradox? A paradox is something that seems like a contradiction but is not. Usually showing something is a paradox and not a contradiction requires giving an example. After all, as Wittgenstein insisted, it’s easier to show than to explain.
In our Gospel reading today, the Lord sets forth the central paradox of Christianity. This paradox is demonstrated by the Paschal Mystery of suffering, death, and resurrection. What is this paradox at the heart of Christianity? “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”1
Note that it is not just a matter of losing one’s life. At some point, we will all die. Blunt, I know, but a given. Memento mori, remembering death, is an important element of genuine spirituality. The Lord teaches that it is losing one’s life for his sake, that is, for the sake of the Gospel- Jesus Christ himself being the good news- that one finds it.
This is not just true in the by-and-by. As anyone who regularly serves those in need can tell you, it happens in the here and now. What this shows is that this paradox, this hard saying, can be verified through experience. Experience is the crucible through which Jesus’ teaching goes from being idealistic hypotheses to what is really real.
When it comes to faith, many people understandably want things simplified. Experience, whether it is in service to others, or the practice of the other two fundamental spiritual disciplines of prayer and fasting, is how the abstract is made concrete. Even when it comes to God’s tri-unity or Christ’s true divinity and true humanity, experience is how you really come to grasp these divine realities. Faith that is true is more existential than metaphysical, more experiential than theoretical.
How you lose your life for the Lord’s sake is by embracing the cross. When it comes to redemption, we must experience for ourselves that there is no resurrection without the cross and that the cross without resurrection means pain and suffering have the last word.
Our first reading illustrates this well if we extend it a bit beyond where our reading from the lectionary ends.2 In fact, our lectionary reading is a bit misleading. It was no doubt chosen to pair with Jesus' teaching that "Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward."3 Hence, the woman extends generous hospitality to the prophet Elisha and he promises her the blessing of a child. As is often the case in scripture, it's a bit more complicated.
After Elisha tells the hospitable woman she would bear a son, this unnamed and up-until-then barren woman nearly rebuked the prophet. She replied as only one who has dealt with disappointment can: “you are a man of God; do not deceive” me.” This is serious business. Anyway, wouldn’t it be easier to just bring some oil, flour, or grain as a thank-you gift?
Elisha and the Shunamite Woman, by Jacob Symonsz Pynas, 1592-1650
A year later, when Elisha returned, he found this woman cradling a healthy baby boy in her arms. Scripture tells us this child had a healthy start to life. Then, one day, going out to his father in their field, he began complaining loudly about a sudden headache. A few hours after a servant carried him home, the boy died in his mother’s lap. Whereupon she laid his body on the bed in which the prophet slept while visiting.
Without skipping a beat, the now forlorn and perhaps angry woman took one of their donkeys and set off to find Elisha. When the prophet, who was on Mount Carmel, spotted his fellow Shunamite some way off, seemingly worried, he sent a servant to see if everything was alright. It’s easy to imagine that through gritted teeth, she told the servant everything was peachy with her husband and son.
But when she made it to the mountain, throwing herself at the feet of the prophet, she said, recalling her reply to the prophet’s promise of a son, said, “Did I ask my lord for a son?” She had not. “Did I not say,” she continued, “‘Do not mislead me’?” Indeed, she had. It’s easy to understand how she felt: having a son and then losing him suddenly while he was still a child was worse for her than never having children at all!
Cutting the story short, Elisha returned home with her and through his ministrations brought her son back to life. While this is good, it doesn’t erase the anguish she experienced. Just as the hope of resurrection does not stop us from mourning those who have died.
This episode gives us deep insight into what Jesus was referring to when he rhetorically asked his disciples on the road to Emmaus, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And then, "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scripture.”4
Our reading from Romans 6 is a longer version of the epistle from the Easter Vigil. By his description of baptism, the apostle, too, teaches that dying and rising is the pattern of redemption. “If, then, we have died with Christ,” he wrote, “we believe that we shall also live with him.”5 This is the post-resurrection take on Jesus’ teaching from today’s Gospel.
Even after his Resurrection, Jesus still bears the wounds of his crucifixion. He will bear these wounds forever. To the Lord, what is most beautiful about you are the wounds you receive for the sake of self-sacrificing love.
Our participation in the Eucharist, at Mass, works the same way it does in Luke’s account of the road to Emmaus. After the liturgy of the word, they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread. Recognizing him, they immediately set off to tell others about their life-changing encounter with the Risen One.
This is summed up nicely in the Church’s Prayer after Communion for this Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. We pray that “bound to [God] in lasting charity” through “this divine sacrifice we offered and received…we may bear fruit that lasts forever.”6
The sacrifice we receive, of course, is Christ in Holy Communion. But the sacrifice we offer the Father, through the Son, by the power of their Spirit is nothing less than ourselves, whole and complete. This is signified by the gifts we bring forward during the Offertory of the Mass. To fruitfully receive Christ body, blood, soul, and divinity, you must offer yourself to God body, blood, soul, and humanity. Otherwise, what we offer God is some inexpensive unleavened wafers and not exactly the finest wine.
Don’t worry, just as the Father transforms our meager gifts of bread and wine into the body and blood of his Son, through the grace of this sacrament, he can transform even a less than total offering of one’s self into an acceptable sacrifice.
1 Matthew 10:39.↩
2 See 2 Kings 4:16b-37.↩
3 Matthew 10:41.↩
4 Luke 24:25-27.↩
5 Romans 6:8.↩
6 Roman Missal. Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Prayer after Communion.↩
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