15 February 2024 Thursday after Ash Wednesday
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Moses said to the people: ‘See, today I set before you life and prosperity, death and disaster. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin on you today, if you love the Lord your God and follow his ways, if you keep his commandments, his laws, his customs, you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to make your own. But if your heart strays, if you refuse to listen, if you let yourself be drawn into worshipping other gods and serving them, I tell you today, you will most certainly perish; you will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today: I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live, in the love of the Lord your God, obeying his voice, clinging to him; for in this your life consists, and on this depends your long stay in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob he would give them.’
Psalm 1:1-4,6 Happy the man who has placed his trust in the Lord.
Luke 9:22-25
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘The Son of Man is destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and to be put to death, and to be raised up on the third day.’
Then to all he said: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that man will save it. What gain, then, is it for a man to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self?’
Reflection:
I was once on a winter camping trip, sleeping in tents, cooking on an open fire. One companion brought a fuel heater to warm his tent, a portable battery-operated television, and a good stock of alcohol to keep him cheerful around the night campfire. When we made fun of him, he retorted, “I just couldn’t live without my creature comforts.”
But, I wonder, what did he mean by saying he “couldn’t live” without them? How do you define life? Do we really believe that life is defined as the dictionary does, as, “any system capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolizing, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli.” Is that really life?
When Moses said to the people, “I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live”, he wasn’t suggesting they simply metabolise. He was telling them to live “in the love of the Lord your God, obeying his voice, clinging to him; for in this your life consists.”
Real life is relational.
George Harrison once sang, “Tell me, what is my life without your love, tell me, who am I, without you, by my side.” This song was considered either, a love song to Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd, or like many of his compositions, a devotional song to the Divine.
Jesus walks the path of life that leads to his death, and this pathway of death, leads to his life. But the life he seeks is not survival, but his intimate knowledge of his father. Truly, Jesus could sing, “who am I, without you, by my side.”
The Holy Father, Francis, in one morning meditation said, “We cannot think about the Christian life apart from this journey that He first made. It is the journey of humility. For the Christian way of life without the cross is not in fact Christian, and if the cross is a cross without Jesus, it is not Christian.”
The cross is not carried for its own sake but for the sake of the One who makes life worth living. “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that person will save it.”
What is life?
The true meaning of life is found in love. Just ask any two people in love if giving their lives for the other makes it worthwhile – of course it does – it makes perfect sense when you are in love. For life is love.
So then, let us choose life.