Dead before the actual death!
2 Kgs 11: 1-4, 9-18, 20; Mt 6: 19-23
'Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be!' 'For all those who draw the sword will die by the sword!' These are foregone conclusions and bygone experiences. Still, when it comes to our choices, we dare to be foolish. Everyone knows that possession and position are by no means permanent. No one claims that he or she will carry along what one holds here on earth, when this earthly sojourn is done with. But still the craze of hoarding wealth or the avarice for power over people does not cease in any case. The treacherous events of the first reading reminds us of these strange human choices.
As the book of Deuteronomy (30:15,16)) tells us: there is open before us the choice for life or for death. None of us can sincerely say that we are absolutely unaware of it when we choose something bad! The choice is always ours. The Lord has given us the Spirit and the wisdom of the Spirit, the eye to see, the light within us to be illumine, which instruct us the right way at every one of our steps as Isaiah tells us (Is 30:21). It is our responsibility to be attune to the voice, the whispering that guides us. It is our task to resist the temptation of making the wrong choice. And it requires maturity of faith to accept this responsibility. When we fail to accept it, or when we yield to the attractions of the temptation, we make a choice - a choice for death and not life, a choice for destruction and not prosperity. In those choices, however successful we seem to be, we are dead before our actual death!