Dead before our death!

WORD 2day: Friday, 11th week in Ordinary time

June 17, 2022: 2 Kings 11: 1-4, 9-18, 20; Matthew 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. Just think of the great wealthy barons of various circles today - how they go on pounding for more and more wealth in spite of the heaps that they have. Or think of those who possessed enormous luxuries but ended up pathetic at the close of their lives. Had their choices really added value to their life!

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 illumined, which instruct us the right way at every step of ours, 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 long before our actual death!