Losing to Win for paper Feb 25
After the transfiguration Jesus begins to teach his disciples. He said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” The disciples hear, but do not understand. As they approach Capernaum the disciples argue as they travel. Jesus asks them what they were arguing about, but they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”
There was an apparent change in plans. A new direction for the mission. Jesus was coming down off the mountain where He showed His divine glory to three of His disciples – Peter, James, and John. And now for the first time He starts talking about something completely different: His death and resurrection. This was the plan: He was going to be delivered into the hands of men who would kill him. And when He is killed, after three days, He would rise.
The disciples didn’t understand and they were afraid to ask. Besides, they had more important things to discuss on the road, things like who was the greatest among them. Jesus is talking about the cross, and His disciples are preoccupied with their own glory. Jesus is looking to lose His life to save the world, and His disciples are angling for the power positions in the kingdom.
We are geared from birth to think in those terms. Great is good and higher is better. The gold medal is the one we want dangling from our necks, not second place silver or third place bronze. When you win the gold, you stand higher up on the platform, a little closer to the gods, a little higher than your fellow man. We admire the winners and look down on the losers, and if God can help us become winners, then that’s the kind of God we will follow.
It’s a competitive world out there, with everyone scrambling to climb on every else’s back. I can just hear Peter, James and John and the rest of the disciples bickering on the way to Capernaum. They had best work out the pecking order. Who was going to be in charge here in the coming Kingdom?
Jesus has an entirely different plan. Not power but weakness. Not glory but a cross. Not the greatness of winning but the greatness of losing, losing one’s life in order to gain it, losing it all in order to gain it all, laying down His life as our ransom from Sin and Death.
Do you want to be great in God’s eyes? Then you must become small and insignificant. Do you want to be a winner in the kingdom of God? Then you must become a loser in this world of winners. Peter tells us “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 1 Peter 5:5
Media mogul Ted Turner, a wealthy man many times over, who once said jokingly that juggling four girlfriends was “easier than being married” and also once famously said: “Christianity is for losers.”
Although he did not realize it, the man could not have been more correct. To be baptized is to be a child of God. Child of God. Yes we are priests and kings and all that, but first and foremost, you are a “child of God.” Like a little child, utterly helpless, utterly givable to, utterly dependent on God’s mercy. To be a child of God, baptized and believing, is to lose your life in order to save it, to become nothing so that Christ can be everything, to die in order to rise, to be joined to Jesus in His death and life.
Faith doesn’t ask who is the greatest. Rather “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.” Greatness involves losing your life to truly win life.
“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Christ and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”
Blessings,