Choose life, then.

 Moses said to the people:

“Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom… Choose life, then.” 

There are a seemingly infinite array of dangers waiting to kill us, socially and symbolically, if not literally. Death, symbolic and otherwise, always threatens. The key question of Lent is: will Death run your life?

Will you spend your life desperately trying to avoid all the pitfalls of social etiquette, office politics, family dynamics, and financial uncertainties? Or will you live like a free human being, not controlled by the need to cling to life as you know it? 

“Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom… Choose life, then.”

Preparation for Easter is a life and death decision, spiritually speaking. None of us can master Death, as we all acknowledge on our better days, or in our more courageous moments, or when we wake up in a cold sweat at 3am when the anxieties we shoved away during the day come knocking again and will not be ignored. But so often we distract ourselves to death to avoid our Death. Lent is like a cold wind sweeping away our illusions and shocking us with the naked truth of our lives. Will we confront it? Or will we play games, sacrificing others, especially those a little further below us in the pecking order, to push Death away just a little further, to keep it at bay just a little longer?

“Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom… Choose life, then.”

Lent is a time for repentance, and the connection to sin is clear: sin is the game we play to keep hold of the illusion that we are in ultimate control of our destinies. To hold that illusion, we keep a death grip on our little pleasures, our little fiefdoms, our little relationships. Stop it. It won’t save you. To live, Jesus shows us that we must join him and take up our cross. Looking death in the eye while holding on to Christ is the only way through. 

“Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom… Choose life, then.”

Author: Matt Erickson, Theology Department