Finding By Losing

 

Deacon Dave · Finding By Losing

Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 28, 2026. Gospel of St. Matthew 10:37-42. Theme: Finding By Losing 

 At first hearing, the opening lines of today’s Gospel sound harsh. As a matter of fact because of this they have come to be called the “hard sayings of Jesus”. But what they are telling us is that our relationship with Christ and commitment to His Gospel teachings must be the primary focus of our lives. These hard sayings bring us into daily confrontation with ourselves, because they call us to follow Jesus along His way of self-forgetting love which runs contrary to our natural inclinations. 

 The most mysterious of these sayings is called “the great paradox of finding by losing.” Jesus proclaimed it when He said, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." This sounds like a riddle to us, but what He was saying was that the key to unlocking the real meaning and purpose of our lives is found in His Great Commandment of love in which we are taught that when it comes to the priorities of life, God comes first, others second and ourselves last. Christian spirituality calls this “ the way of forgetting self” and what it teaches us is that the more tightly we cling to ourselves, to our self-focused ambitions, the more the real meaning and purpose of life will slip right through our fingers. 

 You know, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a man who from our culture's point of view had everything going for him. He had spent the best years of his life climbing the ladder of success. He worked hard, earned a great salary, had a beautiful spacious home, and gained the admiration of his peers. As he shared his story I noticed that there was not even one mention or thought of God or neighbor in his words. So I was saddened but not surprised when he ended his story by saying, "I have everything I thought I ever wanted and more, so why do I still feel so empty deep inside?" You see, in expending all energy to find the social status he yearned for, he had in the process lost his life. And his experience is not unique. Many people give everything they’ve got to seek happiness according to our culture’s definition of success only to discover later in life that they had traveled down a dead-end street. True joy, real peace and authentic self-fulfillment can only be found in the practice of Christian love which is what the hard sayings of Jesus are really all about. 

 We American Catholics have an amazing example of this paradox of finding by losing in one of our very own saints, Katherine Drexel. She was heiress to the immense Drexel banking and business fortune based in Philadelphia and New York. She was also a devout Catholic with a heart of mercy and a thirst for justice for the poor and forgotten. When Katherine was 26 years old her widower-father died leaving her a $250 million inheritance trust fund. She was young and had a very promising life opening up before her. Now stop for a moment and think… what would you do with your life if you were 26 and suddenly had $250 million at your disposal?” 

 Well, Katherine used it to start a religious order of Sisters dedicated to serving the spiritual and material needs of Black and Native Americans. Every last penny of her inheritance went to building parishes, hospitals and schools, including the now world famous Drexel University of Louisiana, which she funded so that the segregated minorities could have equal access to higher education. In Katherine's long life (she died in 1955 at the age of 96) we can see the three hard sayings of Jesus lived out in stark flesh and bone reality. First, she cherished her relationship with Christ above all others. Second, she didn’t run away from the cross but lived constantly in its shadow because she was a voice for racial harmony long before the civil rights movement. And thirdly, she found the real purpose of her life by losing her fortune to something greater than herself. 

 The more Katherine gave away of her inheritance, the richer she became in heavenly treasure. The more she surrendered herself to God, the freer she became to live a truly meaningful life. The more she belonged to Jesus Christ, the more she was filled with joy in becoming the woman she was created to be. Katherine knew full well that she didn't have it within her to live the hard sayings of Jesus and that she could only do so through the power of Christ living in her! And so, she made the Eucharist the center of her daily life As a matter of fact, she named her religious community the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament precisely so that they would never forget where their source of love was to be found and where they would get the spiritual fuel they needed to keep on loving as Jesus loves. That’s an important lesson for us as well! 

 But here’s the thing we need to keep in mind. The saints are not some kind of special class of super-human beings. They were just like us in every way. They had the same hopes, dreams, and desires for a good and happy life as we do. They also had our same struggles, fears, character defects, temptations and sins. But they never turned back from the path of “finding by losing”. When they failed they just got right back up, dusted themselves off, and kept on trying as best they could to love as Jesus loves. So we can’t simply admire them from a safe distance and excuse ourselves from following their example by saying, “Oh well, of course they could do it. After all, they were saints.” 

 Now I'm pretty sure that most of us here don’t have a multimillion dollar trust fund to give away like Katherine did. But that's not the point. That was just an extraordinary example in one person’s life. But any one of us here can become just like her in the way of Jesus, the way of finding by losing, if we choose to give Christ first place in our lives, if we choose to carry whatever cross may come our way because of our fidelity to the Gospel, and if we choose to do our best to love as Jesus loves. By living in this way we’ll discover the happiness that we’re all searching for as we live out our lives here on planet Earth. We’ll discover our purpose for which we were each created, which is to know, love and serve God in this world so as to be happy with Him forever in the next.