The Good News of Christ, A Paradox

"He who saves his life loses it; he who loses his life saves it!"

The Gospel is written to us in the opposite language. That’s because the "teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour", are meant to be understood in the reverse manner. Thus, the Christian Message, unlike all worldly messages are messages of PARADOXES.

What is a paradox? A paradox is an apparent contradiction. It sounds "untrue, and unreal; but it is the "truth", and it is the "reality". And so in the Bible, there are plenty of examples of paradoxes. The Beatitudes express all its statements as paradoxes. E.g. to be poor is to be blessed, to cry is to be fortunate, or to be oppressed and persecuted is happiness. There are more similar statements like these in the Beatitudes.

But right now, from our Gospel of this Sunday, we have the above verse, "..He who saves his life loses it; he who loses his life saves it!" (Of course the exact phrase in the latter part of this verse, states, ".. he who loses his life for my sake saves it!)

(a little pause for interior understanding of the verse)

From my Internet postings, I stated, "In the eyes of the world all suffering and abjectness, albeit poverty, ugliness, vulnerableness, pain, losses, sicknesses, death, unfair treatment, persecution & oppression are bad, dishonorable, and despicable. But to Christ, the above mentioned negative realities are not necessarily evil, and undesirable. On the contrary, all the above can become very effective participation with Christ’s redemptive and holy act of love sacrifice. In other words, all the enumerated realities above are actually defining moments of grace coming from the Lord. For they are the stuff that make saints."

On another occasion, speaking of a very similar type of statement, our Lord Jesus said, "Unless the seed is buried, and dies; it does not bear fruit. But if it dies, it bears many fruits." And we can add, and it leads to a plentiful harvest. Then from our Gospel of this Sunday, we heard of similar paradoxical statements or commands from the Lord to the disciples. We heard Jesus tell us, "Unless you deny yourselves, take up your cross daily, and follow me; you can not be my disciples." And he ended the above statements with a follow up statement, which we quoted at the beginning of this talk, "..He who saves his life loses it; he who loses his life for my sake saves it!" And so we are to listen to our Lord, and we are to face up to this challenging mandate of Jesus not with our mere human eyes, but with our eyes of faith!