Dt 30:15-20 / Lk 9:22-25
Suicide is one of the most terrible things that any human being can do. Indeed, to most of us the thought of throwing away God’s gift of life is incomprehensible and inclines us to presume that the person who does so must be out of his mind, at least temporarily insane.
Yet many of the choices that we make day by day certainly qualify as lesser versions of the very same thing, little suicides in which we kill a tiny part of ourselves. The most obvious examples, of course, involve things like substance abuse, chain smoking, compulsive eating and the like, which directly attack our bodies. It’s easy and obvious to say to ourselves, “Stop that before you kill yourself.”
But there are all sorts of more subtle forms of slow suicide of the spirit. Cherishing grievances, hating, clinging to our things and refusing to share, using people instead of loving them, pretending we’re self-sufficient, pretending we don’t need God. And the list goes on and on.
In today’s Old Testament reading, the Lord is speaking to this blind suicidal tendency in us all. “Choose life,” he says. Choose life, and don’t let appearances fool you as to where real life is.
Jesus showed us what a real life looks like. As the days of Lent pass one by one, may your face and your heart come to look more and more like His.
