Two minutes before wrestling practice started, I was in the mat room, stretching. I had that familiar knot in the pit of my stomach that I had before every wrestling practice in high school. But on this day, it was a particularly large and potent one, because the state tournament was coming up, and the pressure to win, both individually and as a team, was mounting. And as my teammates gathered and stretched around me, I could tell that they were feeling it, too.
The coach walked in, right on time as always. “Take a knee,” 
he said, just like always, and we clustered around him, expecting to hear the plan for that day’s practice. But that’s not where he started. “Andy’s not here,” he began. Andy (not his real name) was a junior who was so good that he had come in second in the state tournament the previous year as a sophomore, losing in a close match in the state finals against a graduating senior who had also won state the year before. That meant that Andy was easily the favorite to win state this year, since his only real competition last year had graduated. His biggest challenge was making weight to stay in his weight class.
If you don’t know, high school wrestling requires wrestlers to be a certain weight or less to compete in that class to keep the competition fair. In this case, Andy was trying to wrestle at 135 pounds, but that was proving harder than the year before because, as a high school junior, he had simply grown bigger even though he had a ridiculously low body fat count. So each match there was a bit of a question about whether he would “make weight” during the weigh-in right before the match. If he was even an ounce over 135 pounds, he would be disqualified for that match. So when the coach said, “Andy’s not here,” my first thought was that he must have fallen behind in his weight discipline and be doing extra conditioning.
“Andy’s not here,” coach said, “and he won’t be for the rest of the season. He’s been suspended from the team.” And the coach explained that he had discovered that, to make weight, Andy wasn’t just doing a lot of conditioning, he had taken banned substances to help him do that, which were banned because they were quite dangerous to the health of the wrestler. When the season began, the coach had made clear that using anything banned to make weight would mean an immediate suspension for the season. Now it was actually happening, to arguably our best wrestler on the team, right before the state championship. The coach paused as he finished his explanation, and looked around at each of us. “I know you want to win. I want to win, too. And Andy wanted to win. And he’ll get another chance next year if he straightens up. But winning is NOT everything, boys. It’s better to lose right than win wrong; don’t ever forget that.”
After that practice, we lingered in the locker room, talking about what had happened. Nobody thought what Andy had done was right; nobody thought what the coach had done was wrong. But we were still lamenting that this meant our chances in the state tournament were severely lessened. One of my teammates finally said what several had been thinking. “You know, most other coaches in the state would have just looked the other way,” he blurted out. We all sat with that a minute, both grateful for and, if we were honest, a little frustrated by our coach’s stubborn integrity. Finally the team captain spoke. “Well,” he said; if winning isn’t everything, then losing isn’t, either. All we can do is…all we can do. So let’s do it.”
The saying that both my coach and my team captain were playing on, of course, is that “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Vince Lombardi, the long-time football coach of the Green Bay Packers, for whom the NFL Super Bowl Championship Trophy is named because his teams won the first two of them, is credited with the saying. But the saying has gone far beyond football to permeate almost every aspect of our society because it so perfectly encapsulates our cultural fixation on winning, on achievement, on success, as the ultimate status symbol. Even money and possessions are celebrated and sought after not so much for themselves, but as signs and symbols of winning, of status as a winner.
That’s why, in many ways, Jesus’ words here are even more shocking to us than they would have been to a first century audience. In Jesus’ day, literally nobody believed that, with enough talent and focus and willpower and grit and a little bit of luck, anybody can be anything they want, can be a success, can be a winner at life. That would have, at best, been mistaken for a joke and laughed at, and at worst dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic from being so disconnected from the objective state of reality. The people following Jesus had no delusions that following him would bring them wealth and prosperity, yet in our context there is a whole Christian school of thought that has emerged in the last hundred years or so known as “The Prosperity Gospel,” which essentially argues that God wants to bless you with wealth and success and so, if you follow Jesus (and donate generously to the Prosperity Gospel preacher’s ministry), God will reward you with those successes.
Even if we have been able to resist the tempting nonsense of the Prosperity Gospel, though, hearing things like, “those who want to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it,” goes so against everything our culture says about winning and losing, succeeding and failing, that it’s difficult to even comprehend it. There is nothing better than winning, our culture thinks, and there is nothing worse than losing. Everything else is secondary.
But even to the first century disciples, Jesus’ talk about losing was anathema, so much that when he starts in on it, telling the disciples that he is going to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious authorities, be killed, and then be raised from the dead three days later, they can’t take it. Specifically, Peter can’t take it. Peter has literally just finished confessing that Jesus is the Messiah, right before today’s passage begins, which is actually why he takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. You’ve got this Messiah stuff all wrong, he says. If you’re talking about public suffering and humiliation and torment and death, you’re definitely losing, and the whole point of the Messiah, he thinks, it to win. The Messiah can’t lose his freedom, his authority, his control, his dignity, his life. That is quite literally losing everything.
That can’t happen, Peter says to himself, and decides to take matters into his own hands since Jesus obviously doesn’t know what he’s saying. He pulls Jesus aside and begins to “rebuke” him. That’s not how to be the Messiah, he hisses urgently at Jesus. But Jesus rebukes him right back: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but human things.” Jesus says “get behind me” because that is literally where Peter is supposed to be as a disciple; to be a disciple means to follow, and to follow you must get behind the person you’re following. Calling Peter “Satan” sounds harsh, but Jesus isn’t just calling him names. Remember Satan tempts Jesus at the beginning of his ministry by trying to sett his mind on human things on winning at his life and ministry by focusing on his own needs and succeeding through power instead of service and suffering, and now here is Peter doing the same thing: encouraging Jesus to be a Messiah without rejection, without humiliation, without pain, without death.
Peter, in short, wants Jesus to be a Messiah who doesn’t lose, and Jesus responds by saying, “Losing isn’t everything.” Jesus has already explained that he’s going to win by losing first: this whole disagreement started when Jesus explained that he was going to undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed, AND after three days rise again. Peter is trying to tell Jesus, you can’t win by losing, and Jesus is telling him, it’s the only way to win. Those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will find it.
It sounds like a paradox, but it’s not; it’s a statement of fact. If our focus is first and foremost on self-preservation, whether we are an individual or a church or anything else, we will inevitably end up losing that life. Nobody wants to be in relationship with someone who makes all their decisions based on how it protects or benefits them. A church whose mission is self-perpetuation withers and dies because it views people beyond its membership as resources to be mined and captured and counted instead of people to partner with in ministry simply because that’s what Jesus calls us to do. We have to be willing to lose our sense of comfort and familiarity and predictability and control if we’re going to be in authentic relationship with anybody, from Jesus to fellow Christians to our neighbors. We have to accept not just the resurrection of Christ but the death that precedes it; there is no Easter without Good Friday; there is no resurrection without death; there is no winning without losing. It is what the season of Lent is all about.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Greek verb that means “to lose” can also be translated “to let go; to release.” When we realize that, it’s easier to recognize that losing truly isn’t everything, that Jesus isn’t simply saying that we have to accept losing our lives in the sense of them being wrested out of our hands; he means to let go of our lives or release them, because it is only in letting go of our lives that our hands are free to accept and live out the grace and meaning and purpose with which God seeks to fill them in Jesus Christ.
Refusing to lose our lives for the sake of the gospel and still calling ourselves followers of Christ is like saying we’re trapeze artists who refuse to let go of the first swing so we can grab hold of the second one, so we end up just swinging back and forth with less and less energy until we come to a standstill and just hang there. Letting go of the trapeze can be scary, but it can also be exhilarating, and in any case it is the only way to keep moving, to grasp what is coming to us instead of just holding on to what we have until we finally lose our grip. It is the way we can move forward and back and forward again, with strength and beauty and power until our act is done. So let us chalk up our hands, and climb the ladder, and swing out into the future, trusting that losing truly is not everything, but it is in being willing to release our grip on our lives that we will find that they have been safely in God’s hands all along.