Today’s readings seem to contain a contradiction.
In the early readings, we’re assured that following God will mean a long and happy life. Deuteronomy tells us that choosing to keep the commandments is the same as choosing life and blessings for ourselves and our families. The Psalm promises us that the person who delights in the law of the Lord finds prosperity in all that they do.
But then we get to the Gospel, and Jesus appears to reverse this promise. We should not follow God if we want a long and prosperous life, he says:
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What to make of this? Especially given that, elsewhere, Jesus says things like, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” Of course we want a life full of God’s abundant blessings. And of course, we want to preserve our lives—Jesus himself wanted to live.
When I was puzzling this over, I found it helpful to go to John’s version of this same quote, which trades the language about what we want for language about what we love:
Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
We already know the commandments about love. We are meant to love God, and then ourselves and our neighbors. Nowhere on that list is “our life.” Which means we have to learn to separate “ourselves” from “our lives.” We are not our lives. I recently read a story about the friendship between the Sisters of Mary Morning Star and the women on Texas’s death row. The women on the row have a vegetable garden that they are allowed outside to tend for two hours a day, though they are not allowed to keep any of the vegetables. One of the sisters reflected on the beauty of the women dedicating themselves to their vegetable patch and finding meaning in the task, despite all the surrounding ugliness. The women are not living the lives that they had hoped for. But they are still loved, no matter what shape their life has taken, and they still love the God who gave them life.
Today’s Gospel is Good News for the seven women on the row. Our eternal lives will be the inverse of our mortal ones. The last shall be first. Those who hate their lives shall live. But what about us?
So many of us (including me) confuse loving ourselves or loving God with loving the wealthy, comfortable, respectable lives God has blessed us with. We live lives with agency and choice, where we are surrounded by people who like and love and
admire us, where we don’t experience significant pain or heartbreak, and we imagine that this is a sign of how much God loves us. But do we love these blessings because they help us see God or we do we love them for themselves, and cling to them even when God is drawing us elsewhere? Would we be willing to lose these lives and live very different ones, if God but called our name? Because more likely than not, He is.
Lent is a time to rid ourselves of our attachment to one particular vision of our lives and instead learn to find God in the life we are actually living, and to trust that we will find God in any life he presents us with, even the hardest versions we can imagine. It is a good time to let go of some ideas we are carrying about what we need to have a happy, comfortable, meaningful life. We practice with the small things—meat, a hot shower in the morning, an afternoon coffee, scrolling our phone before bed—to prepare us for when God asks us to change something in our lives that feels much, much bigger.
We might find that we’ve been so focused on saving our life as it is that we’ve been saying no to a different life, and its blessings, that God has been trying to give us.
