Choose life and Lose Life - True Christian Love
Thursday after Ash Wednesday - 2nd March, 2017
Dt 30:15-20; Lk 9:22-25
The Word today sets one thinking, even a bit confusing. The first reading tells us to choose life and the Gospel challenges us to lose life! Do we choose or do we lose it?
The confusion will be cleared and we will understand that both these injunctions - to choose life and to lose life - are one and the same, if we look at it from the point of view of love!
True Christian love is about choosing and losing life at one and the same time: choosing life which is God and ready to lose our life for God, for others in the name of God. The two pronged love that Christ stood for, advocated, lived and died for, is what is spoken of in the Word today. Choosing God is choosing life; not to choose God is choosing death! Losing life is being ready to give up one's life for having deliberately chosen God. Choosing life is to choose to love God; losing life is to choose to love God so much that one is ready even to lay one's life down for God and for God's purposes.
Love teaches us to choose God as a way to choose life; it prepares me to lose my life for the sake of those whom God has entrusted me with, specially the most needy and the most suffering. Love makes my life precious and it is the same love that makes me capable of giving up that life! The school of love is on.
Dt 30:15-20; Lk 9:22-25
The confusion will be cleared and we will understand that both these injunctions - to choose life and to lose life - are one and the same, if we look at it from the point of view of love!
True Christian love is about choosing and losing life at one and the same time: choosing life which is God and ready to lose our life for God, for others in the name of God. The two pronged love that Christ stood for, advocated, lived and died for, is what is spoken of in the Word today. Choosing God is choosing life; not to choose God is choosing death! Losing life is being ready to give up one's life for having deliberately chosen God. Choosing life is to choose to love God; losing life is to choose to love God so much that one is ready even to lay one's life down for God and for God's purposes.
Love teaches us to choose God as a way to choose life; it prepares me to lose my life for the sake of those whom God has entrusted me with, specially the most needy and the most suffering. Love makes my life precious and it is the same love that makes me capable of giving up that life! The school of love is on.
LOVE-LENT 2017 - THE WORD IN LENT #2