To Love Is to Lose
Pope Leo XIV told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square that love only bears fruit when we are willing to lose. Today’s Gospel asks what we are still gripping with both hands.
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“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” — Matthew 10:39
Most of us walk into Mass on a June weekend hoping for a little rest. The Gospel of Matthew hands us has other plans.
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The sayings come in a rush, with no cushion between them.
Jesus asks us to love him ahead of our own parents and children, to take up a cross, to surrender the single life we are given — and he asks it fast, before we can file down the edges. The urgency is deliberate. Each line presses on the same nerve, the reflex to clutch what we have and call it ours: our people, our plans, the security we have assembled, the self we spent years constructing.
Then the passage pivots without warning.
Having asked for everything, Jesus turns to the humblest gestures of welcome — receiving a prophet, making room for a righteous person, holding out a cup of cold water to a child. The towering demand and the small kindness arrive in the same breath, as though no real distance separated them. None does.
Pope Leo XIV preached on this Gospel at the Angelus on Sunday.
Love asks three things of us before it can bear fruit, he said: detachment, loss, and hospitality. The middle word is the one we fight. “We find it difficult to understand this,” Leo admitted, “especially in a world where losing is seen as weakness and we are obsessed with having and possessing.”
According to the Gospel, he said, those who hold on to their lives “merely for themselves actually lose them.” Then he reached back to Augustine: “It is painful to part from what you love. Yet even the farmer temporarily loses what he sows.”
I learned this the hard way. It started as a college freshman at Xavier.
