Choose Life, not Death

Today’s readings, Dt. 30: 15-20 and Luke 9: 22-25, challenge us with the following statements: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom….Choose life, then,…by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.”  In the Gospel Jesus says to us: “If anyone wishes to come after me, he [or she] must deny…[him or herself] and take up his [or her] cross daily and follow  me. For whoever wishes to save his [or her] life for my sake will save it….”  Following Jesus, we know, leads to death and resurrection. Many times, we focus only on the dying part and get scared and flee the scene as the apostles did on Calvary. But following Jesus, dying with Jesus, always  leads to resurrection, to new life, new hope, deeper faith and stronger loving.  The dying is what is difficult. None of us cherishes letting go of that in us that needs to die if new life is to arise for us and in and through us.  

Recently, in a slump, I cried out to the Lord, offering Him the following prayer:

“Lord, I give you my all:

•   My holiness and sinfulness

•   My humility and my pride

•   My hope and my hopelessness

•   My manipulativeness and my straightforwardness

•   My generosity and my stinginess

•   My love and my hate

•   My serenity and my anxiety

•   My selflessness and my selfishness

•   My faith and my faithlessness”

The cross—my sinful nature, my weaknesses, my frustrations, my disappointments, my doubts and fears and anxieties, my pride—all of that I need to take up, acknowledge, bring to the Lord in humility and trust. 

Follow me, Jesus, says to us.  Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem. Deliberately! Even when He knew that the chief priests and leaders of his people were waiting to arrest him, charge him as a blasphemer and put him to death, He still went to this city to “sell all”.  Choosing death was, for Jesus, choosing life for all of us. Jesus truly believed in the resurrection. In John 2: 19, Jesus says to the Jews: “Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up.”

Do I believe that when I allow Jesus to destroy sin in me, that He will raise me up in three days to new life, new hope, deeper love?

Challenged to leave our comfort zones

In today’s first reading, Acts 9: 31-34, Peter invites Aeneas, a  paralytic for eight years, to get up and make his bed!  He immediately is healed by Peter’s faith  in the Risen Lord.  People hear that Peter is not that far away from Joppa, where Tabitha, a highly respected woman, has died. Peter  goes to Joppa and finds people wailing, deeply saddened by the loss of Tabitha, a person who reached out to the poor in the area. Her generosity, her love, her commitment to be of service in whatever way possible was well  known.  Peter goes up to the room where the dead body is laid out, asks everyone to leave the room, kneels down in prayer, and then, believing in the power of the Risen Lord to do the impossible, humanly speaking,  turns to the body and says to Tabitha: Rise, get up. He then presents her alive to those who were grieving her loss.

Many times you and I are like the two people in today’s first reading. Parts of us may be  impaired, lying dormant “in bed,” where we feel safe, comfortable, and unchallenged. Other parts of us may be “dead” and need to be raised to new life.  Nothing is impossible to God, as Peter’s faith in the Risen Lord reveals. 

Right now,  it is springtime. All of nature is coming alive, leaving its dormant state, rising from what looks like death to the naked eye.  We see the power of the Lord’s  resurrection in the tiny seeds that bear flowers, brilliant pink and white blossoms. We see God’s  creativity also in the night sky when billions of stars appear.

The transformation of Aeneas, of Tabitha, of nature are testimony of our Creator’s ability to transform our lives as well. Whether any one of us is in the springtime, the summertime, the fall time, the wintertime of our lives, God has the power to bring forth new life, to do what needs to be done at any moment to bring life out of death, mobility out of immobility, to get the “Aeneas” part of ourselves “out of bed” and the “Tabitha” part of ourselves to a resurrected state in which the good we are meant to do continues to be realized by our renewed efforts.