Losing for God!

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jer 38:4-6, 8-10; Heb 12:1-4; Lk 12:49-53

The twentieth Sunday invites us to reflect on losing for God and gaining eternal life. 

Oftentimes, who we are is about the principles we have stood for in life. If commitments are the best ways to assess our moral integrity, the same holds true for the life of a disciple. 

Hence, today’s readings invite us to examine what animates our lives as disciples of Christ. 

The first reading portrays the prophet Jeremiah as someone who unsettles the consciences of those who turned their backs on God. Thus, when Jeremiah exposes their betrayal of the Lord, they are angry and want to get rid of him. Their reaction is a testament to the fact that they cannot stand someone who is prophetic in words and actions. Even if the prophets came speaking in God’s name, all they could think of was resisting God’s emissaries without thinking of conversion. The passage reminds us that being prophetic in God’s name comes with a cost, just as we witness in the persecution of the prophet Jeremiah.

The second reading highlights sinful life as a threat to Christian vocation, which, to thrive, should be in conflict with and oppose its charming and deceitful ways. Only if we take our eyes away from that which distracts us from the cause of God can we have our eyes fixed on Christ, who willingly embraced the cross to lighten our burden. With this insight, Paul invites his readers to struggle against the temptations to sin so that we submit ourselves to the Lord in sincerity of heart. Paul emphasizes that for the disciples of Christ, ‘losing for God’ would mean dying to a life of sin and rising to a life of virtues. 

In the Gospel reading, we find Jesus saying that he has come to the world not to announce peace but to set it on fire. How can we understand Jesus’ statement if we hold that he is a symbol of our union? 

In today’s Gospel text, Jesus cautions us that we must not misunderstand the unity that Jesus talks of as either conformity or acceptability. On a different note, Jesus means that peace is not the absence of noise but the fulfilment of justice. Hence, being peace lovers and followers of Jesus cannot happen without us opposing what is unjust. For this reason, we cannot flow with the current of the world when its ways contradict the Gospel teaching. 

To explain the same, we may turn to the example of Joanna (Lk 8:1), the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household. We may say that on account of following Jesus and as a mark of her faithful discipleship, Joanna led a divided life because by choosing to serve Jesus, she opposed the ideals that her husband stood for. Hence, the household enmity that Jesus describes is in fact a division of loyalty – to Jesus or to the world. This is why befriending the world and following Christ seem inherently contradictory. Here, losing for God would be to challenge worldliness with the Gospel of Christ. 

With these helpful insights, the Gospel wisdom invites us to seek further clarifications. 

1. We must ask ourselves if we are conformists or counter witnesses. Following Jesus allows no confusion between goodness and conformity or acceptability. 

2. Real peace is absence of vices and not voices. Are we the conscience of the society by being the change agents? Are we interested in peace or silence?

3. The society has a strange way of branding the activists as dissenters and troublemakers. How are we disposed to just praxis and activism, holding on to the Gospel truth? 

Regarding the virtue of losing for God, St. Ignatius of Antioch preached, citing the example of Moses, ‘I would rather be a martyr than a monarch. Moses chose to suffer with the people of God rather than to enjoy all the pleasures and riches of Egypt.’

Let us pray that we may thrive as disciples of Christ by losing ourselves for God.

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar