“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.”

I remember once hearing the story of a man by the name of Omelyan Kovch — He is actually Blessed Omelyan Kovch. He was a Ukrainian Catholic priest who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. And his family knew that he went to this concentration camp, and they began to desperately try to get him released him from that awful place of torture and death. 

But Blessed Omelyan wrote a letter back to his family — in response to all their efforts to try and save him. And these are his incredible words:

“I understand that you are trying to free me. But I am asking you not to do anything. I thank God for His kindness to me. Except for heaven, this is the only place I would like to be. I am the only priest here. I couldn’t even imagine what would happen here without me. Here… I see God.”

How intense and insane is that? “I understand you’re trying to free me….I understand that you are trying to save my life — but I am asking you NOT to.”

This spirit of heroic sacrifice and willingness to lose one’s life reminds me of another great saint of our Catholic tradition — Saint Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop and martyr who in the early 100’s AD went off willingly to his death in the Roman Colosseum. 

His people, the flock of the city of Antioch, tried very hard to intervene on his behalf — They tried to save him from public torture, humiliation, and death. But he, too, wrote back to them begging them not to interfere.

“Things are off to a good start,” he writes.

Can you believe that? “Things are going well!”

Ignatius is on his way to his DEATH — He’s about to be eaten alive by hungry lions and tigers in front of thousands of eager spectators. But… things are off to a good start, he says!

Then we get to the heart of what his letter is all about:

“May I have the good fortune… THE GOOD FORTUNE!… to meet my fate without interference! Grant me no more than to be a sacrifice for God while there is an altar at hand.”

What he’s saying right there is stunning. And it’s exactly what Blessed Omelyan Kovch said, too. They are both saying to the people who love them, who want to preserve them, who want to keep them from dying — “Don’t save me! Allow me to offer myself as a sacrifice! Let me die!”

“I plead with you…” St. Ignatius continues, “…Let me be food for wild beasts — that is how I can get to God.”

That first reading we heard from the prophet Isaiah — one of the so-called Suffering Servant passages that foreshadow the coming of Christ — expresses this willingness to suffer and die perfectly: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting…”

This is the strange and bewildering intensity of all the saints — an intensity that screams out: “God is real. And we are dead serious about following Him…even to the point of pouring out our blood. Please do not try to stop us. Don’t try to spare us. We want to lose our lives for God.”

And that is precisely what Jesus is doing when he rebukes Peter in our gospel this weekend…

Jesus literally calls Peter SATAN… to his face!

That’s the FIRST POPE. “Get behind me, SATAN,” Jesus says…You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” 

Like Blessed Omelyan and Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Christ is saying to his closest friends: “Do not interfere! Do not try to free me from my Cross! You think you’re helping. You think you’re being kind and merciful to me. But you are only getting in the way of God’s will. Instead — Let me die. Let me lose myself. Trust me: It will be for your own good if you do not try to save me.”

Peter somehow thought that he needed to save Jesus. Peter thought his job was to help Jesus avoid inconvenience, difficulty, trial, and persecution. He thought he needed to free Jesus from the cost of sacrifice!

A great GK Chesterton line comes to mind here: “Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump — You may be freeing him from being a camel!”

In other words — Don’t try to free Christ from the burden of His Cross! The Cross is His mission. It’s the entire reason He came to dwell among us in the first place! “The Son of Man must suffer greatly,” he says.

So Peter’s job was NOT to save Jesus! 

…It’s the other way around! 

It was Christ’s job to save Peter… SAVE the entire world! 

Jesus is trying to save YOU… He’s trying to save ME…

…But to do that, the Cross was necessary.

He would have to first lose everything if he was going to save anybody’s soul… And nobody was going to get in His way. Nobody was gonna stop him from doing everything he could to save us.

I think deep down, we get this.

We all understand the essential goodness of self-sacrifice — even if we often avoid it.

But at the end of the day — we all still get it.

We all see the beauty of sacrifice.

We might think of those firefighters who ran into the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 — Twenty-three years ago this past Wednesday…

Nobody, on that day, tried to stop them. Even though they were running towards those buildings when everyone else was running away… Nobody got in their way.

Why? 

Because we all knew… They were trying to save people.

And that is what Jesus is always doing. 

Jesus is trying to save you!

Jesus is trying to save me!

He’s running into the burning building of our broken, sinful souls.

Christ was willing to lose everything so that we might win. This is the beating heart of the Mystery of the Cross — That is how we get saved.

So now our task… is to accept His sacrifice, and then imitate Him.

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.” 

If that is true — then why are we so protective of ourselves? Why do we so closely guard our time, our energy, our money, our projects, our preferences, our entertainment, our egos? 

Why are we so afraid of dying? So afraid of letting go?

I think one of the most common ways we avoid dying is this: 

When we put off going to sleep. 

Now tell me I’m not the only one who has done something like this: It’s time to sleep, you know you have to get up early the next day… but instead of just SACRIFICING the day and GOING TO BED, we feel entitled to a little bit more… more time for yourself, more time to relax, to escape…. So we keep scrolling on our phone… we watch yet another YouTube video… we let Netflix roll right into the next episode of Seinfeld…

Instead of “sacrificing the day,” we refuse to do so.

In a deeper spiritual sense, we refuse to die.

Really, if you think about it, every night’s sleep is like a “little death.” When we sleep, we allow the day to end… and in a way, we allow the whole world to end. Every time we close our eyes to this world, we need to be ready to meet Jesus. 

Perhaps when you were a kid, you learned that little bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

We might also think of the Liturgy of the Hours, where in Night Prayer the Church has us pray that beautiful canticle of St. Simeon each and every night before shutting our eyes to this world: “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace…” In other words: “Lord, now I’m ready to die.”

All of this makes it clear: 

When we go to sleep, we allow the day to end, and in a way…we allow the whole world to end. When we submit to sleep, we freely enter into unconsciousness… we surrender ourselves to the unknown for (hopefully) 6-8 hours if we’re lucky (and if the kids don’t wake you up!)

But there are so many other opportunities for us to sacrifice our lives, to imitate Jesus daily. We can do this!!!! We don’t have to be sent to a concentration camp, or suffer physical persecution to be heroic…

In all of our daily responsibilities, our everyday sufferings, our little acts of patience, forgiveness and love… We permit Jesus to die in us and for us. We take up our cross and follow him.

Jesus is trying to save us.

He wants to die for us… He wants to die in us every day.

Why would we try to stop Him?