THE WORD IN LENT - Thursday after Ash Wednesday
February 18, 2021: Deuteronomy 30: 15-20; Luke 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 them from the point of view of love, the true Christian 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, and 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.
Choosing life is to choose the author of life, instead of the spices of life. Those which add taste and colour to life are good but not essential to live. We would be highly mistaken if we give them the priority place in our life. Life is all about choices and choices are made at every instance in life... every word that I choose to say, every thought I entertain, every deed that I choose to do should manifest a will and a commitment to promote life, and life to the full for everyone!
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! These are inevitable lessons from the Christ-ian school of love!