Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

'Choose life...'
                    Deuteronomy 30

.           .          .

The readings for Thursday after Ash Wednesday are quite a set. (You can find today's readings at Universalis.) I intended to focus my reflections on the psalm for the day, but these three passages of Scripture are so fascinating I can't help but take them together. Today's psalm (Psalm 1) is sandwiched between a reading from Deuteronomy that centres on the injunction, 'Choose life', and the gospel passage in which Jesus says that whoever seeks to save her life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for the sake of Jesus and his gospel will save it.

This business of choosing life must be more complicated than I thought. I remember when I first read this passage from Deuteronomy, when I was maybe 20. I was amused--who needs to be told to choose life? Well. I think that perhaps choosing life is less obvious, and sometimes (often?) less pleasant than it might appear. 'Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me' hardly sounds like the same instruction as 'choose life'. Yet that is precisely it, isn't it? To choose life is to follow Jesus, whose own path involved entering willingly into suffering and death for our sake.

Psalm 1 makes it--choosing life--seem so attractive: to be like a tree planted beside flowing waters  sounds delightful. Who wants to hang out with sinners or scoffers, anyway?  Especially not when the alternative is presented in such beautiful imagery. I find it very easy to forget that scoffing or expressing disdain is not so far from ordinary, garden-variety sarcasm--all it takes is the right object. It is a pretty short step from there to 'sinner'.

Lent is about taking up the cross; it is about choosing life. It is about taking the path that leads to the well-watered garden, a path that runs right through the valley of the shadow of death. It is a time to find Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, and to follow him as he chooses life--our life--and gains it for us. Forgoing chocolate seems like a pretty paltry penance compared to our Lord's passion. But as we follow in his footsteps, it is never about us and what we do: it is always about the imitatio Christi. Our imitation is always and only ever a pale reflection; it is a faint glow that comes not from our will to shine, but from our unwavering focus on the Light.


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