Readings: Dt 30.15-20 / Ps 1 / Lk 9.22 to 25
CHOOSE
It is possible to misinterpret the sign of the ash that started the season of Lent. Rather than exhort us to a more authentic life, we may have crept into a resigned lethargy, we are all poor and dust you shall return, a unique and inescapable fate awaits us! The Sacred Scriptures, sorted by date, prevent us from dwelling on such thoughts, reminding us how important and influential our freedom of choice. For a people who, released from slavery, is before the gift of the land Moses makes an accurate warning: "See, I have set before you life and good, death and evil" (Deuteronomy 30:15). As God can and should lead to his gifts, can not and does not want to force us to passively accept them. At one point, let our freedom is fully revealed. Of course, the Creator God has very clear ideas about what life and death, why did not hesitate to give us 'command', 'laws' and 'standards', useful guide to "because you live and multiply" (30.16 ). But he knows how easily our "heart" knows to turn "back," deceived and seduced by "other gods" (30.17) that lead us to death.
This same voice accompanies the start of our Lenten journey, which wanted to be a conversion to God makes us ideally even before the land of life and liberty, where the Lord died and rose again attracts the new creation. And - maybe it will be trivial - the first effect of this item is reviving the memory of the right and responsibility of having to choose which direction to move the steps. Lent can not begin unless we find the consciousness of being really the architects of our destiny. God takes "to witness" even "heaven and earth" to make sure that things are just so "before" we are "life and death, blessing and curse" (30:19). For this reason - just for this - the Lord is allowed to issue a command: "Therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed" (30:19). For two reasons it is used to the imperative: When you want to cancel the freedom of - and does not seem to be the case of God - when we want to indicate something terribly important, that the other could not take risk.
We all think we know where it is life and we are confident enough to walk every day in the right direction. Yet our presumption will extinguish before the Master's words: "Who wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it "(Lk 9:24). We have learned, over the years and centuries, to produce a lot of idols with which we try to save the skin disease, by the blows of life, from the trauma of the heart, the wounds of the soul, the other, an alien . But nothing and nobody can make to our lives a full and true salvation. We try to "gain the whole world" (9.25), without finding a real reason to live and die, forgetting that we are ashes and that the only thing that will bring out of this world are acts of love that we have been able to do . Nothing more.
Maybe they are not so absurd and paradoxical words with which the gospel requires us to choose, without being "on the board of evil" (Responsorial Psalm): "If anyone would come after me deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me "(9:23). Perhaps the words are truer to take that path that leads to Easter.
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