Persevering in Choosing Life, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, February 23, 2023

Father Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
Memorial of St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr
February 23, 2023
Dt 30:15-20, Ps 1, Lk 9:22-25

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Throughout Lent, we focus first and foremost on God’s desire to save us and we recognize, as we heard yesterday with St. Paul, that “now is the day of salvation.” This Lent, today, is the time to respond. “God so loved the world,” St. John tells us in his most famous passage, “that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God does not want us to perish. He didn’t even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, so that we might not die but have life to the full. But God’s will is not enough, because he willed to make us free. We need to respond to his gift of salvation. Todays’ readings, on our second day in the pilgrimage of Lent, are about the choices we are called to make in response to God’s offer and to the grace he gives us that St. Paul appealed yesterday that we wouldn’t take in vain.
• The choice is framed by Moses in today’s first reading. The Israelites were drawing toward the end of their 40-year pilgrimage in the desert. Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, accompanied them through the desert for four decades and now they were on the opposite side of the Jordan from the long-awaited Holy Land. God had told Moses that he would die before crossing, so Moses, in today’s first reading, was giving as a sort of last will and testament, a summary of what God had done for them and taught them. As the long experience of their time in the desert had taught them, God’s wondrous actions were not enough. The ten plagues weren’t enough. Their passing through the Red Sea on dry land wasn’t enough. The manna from heaven, the daily quails, the water from the rock and the theophanies associated with giving the Ten Commandments were not enough. None was sufficient to keep many of the Jews faithful. Many of them complained that they should have remained with their fleshpots in Egypt, others made a golden calf, even Aaron the high priest fell into the clutches of a wavering faith. So Moses want to urge them to choose and choose wisely. He framed the decision facing them as it truly was, a decision of life and death: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” Moses reminded them that the choice for God is a life-giving choice, a choice full of blessing; and that the choice against God — even if it might seem at first a choice that leads to life and happiness — is actually fatal. This is not something, of course, that they recognized. Throughout the desert they complained that they had left their fleshpots in Egypt behind just to perish in the desert by following the Lord. Along the way, many times they thought that the choice for God was a choice for death. But it was a choice for life. And those who sought the counterfeit path of turning their hearts away from God, of refusing to listen, of adoring and serving other gods, never made it out of the desert.
• That’s the choice that faces all of us in Lent as we enter not into a 40-year but 40-day journey. Lent historically and actually is a catechumenate, an ecclesial preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil or, for those of us who have already been baptized, a 40-day renewal of the meaning of our baptism. Like the Jews, we have been set free from the slavery of sin and death, passing through the waters of baptism like the Jews passed through the Red Sea. We are presently in the desert with Jesus for these 40 days looking with him toward the eternal promised land that is anticipated in the celebration of Easter. It’s a time for us to focus on the graces of our liberation and the choice God has given to our freedom between life-giving fidelity through “loving him, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments,” through “heeding his voice and holding fast to him” or the path that leads to death under the seduction of bringing life.
• The contrast between these two paths is highlighted in today’s Psalm, which is the first of all the Psalms and the one that in a sense orients the praying of any and every psalm. It describes the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night” as like a “tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” He receives life and is able to give life from his contact with the “living water” of God. On the other hand, the “wicked” man, the one follows “the counsel of the wicked, … walks in the company of way of sinners, [and] sits in the company of the insolent” is compared to “the chaff that the wind drives away.” There are no roots, no substance, no life. The Psalm says, “The way of the wicked vanishes.” That’s the choice facing us as we begin Lent. The question arises: Isn’t this choice a no-brainer? Who, after all, would consciously choose death over life? It’s like the choice between eating filet mignon or tree bark. In the Gospel, however, we see why the choice, though conceptually simple, is morally challenging.
• Jesus tells us today that the path of life is paradoxically a path of self-denial. Just as he was going to “suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes and be killed” before being raised to unending life on the third day, so “if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
 and take up his cross daily and follow me.
” He gets even more explicit about that paradox: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
 but whoever loses his life for my sake will save.” In order to obtain life, we need to die to ourselves. We need to lose our life for the sake of God and the Gospel in order to retain it. In the choice between self-denial and self-affirmation, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it really is the former. In the path between the Cross and the comfy recliner, we think the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. In the path between following Christ to Calvary and going to Club Med, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. The path of life doesn’t seem to be life-giving and the path of death, on the contrary, does. But that’s what Jesus wants us to grasp. There’s a choice between forfeiting oneself to gain the whole world or forfeiting the whole world to gain oneself.
• This is why living a good and holy Lent is so important. Lent is meant to help us to make the choice for real life, to help us to walk in the footsteps of Christ, to plant ourselves in his living water in the midst of the desert so that we may grow to eternity. But we need to make the full and conscious choice for life, which requires the full and conscious choice to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Christ. The three Lenten practices, when we choose to live them generously, are all geared to do this. All three teach us self-denial: fasting denies the dominion of our lower appetites, almsgiving denies our selfishness, prayer denies our egocentrism. Each, in a sense, is a Cross that leads to our self-death, because to many it may seem that giving into our cravings, spending what we have on ourselves, and using our time for our own pursuits actually constitute the path of life, but they’re not. And these three practices help us to follow Christ in his own fasting, his giving of himself to the point of death, and his prayer. For this process of communion with Christ and the life he comes to give us to occur, however, we really must choose bold resolutions that can help facilitate these spiritual fruits, rather than soft ones that, even if we keep them, won’t really lead to the crucifixion to the worldliness that is necessary in order to experience the life that Jesus wants to give.
• Someone who shows us how to choose life perseveringly through losing it for Christ and for those for whom he died, is the great saint the Church celebrates today St. Polycarp was the heroic bishop of Smyrna in southwestern Turkey who was martyred on this day in 166. He learned the Gospel as a young boy from St. John the Apostle himself. With Pope St. Clement and St. Ignatius of Antioch (a saint whom he knew, from whom he received a celebrated letter and whose chains he kissed as Ignatius was on the way to martyrdom in Rome), he is one of the three great Apostolic fathers, the great leaders of second generation of Christians. We know how the faith spread so much in the first generations: it was the witness of martyrdom — that sane people treated Jesus as someone worth living for and dying for — and the witness of Christian charity, that Christians would sell all they had, lay the proceeds at the feet of the apostles and bishops to care for everyone as family members where needed. Polycarp presided over that charity and mutual mercy. And at the end of life he also spread the faith, out of love for God and others, through his martyrdom. When the bloodthirsty mobs and soldiers came to arrest him, he said, doubtless based on the words Jesus taught in the Our Father and said in the Garden of Gethsemane, “The will of the Lord be done.” He asked for some time to pray as the guards were provided supper and he prayed for two hours. He entrusted to God his own flock in Smyrna and the Church universal. As he was being brought to the place where he would be tried and killed, some of his captors tried to persuade him out of it by pronouncing Caesar Lord or by offering incense to the statues of the pagan gods, but he replied, “I am resolved not to do what you counsel me.” Later, in the stadium, he was given a chance to save his life simply by cursing Jesus Christ. He replied, “For 86 years I have served him and he has done me no wrong, why would I betray him now?” He had chosen Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life and he was going to persevere in it until the end. They sentenced him to be burned at the stake and as they were tying his feet to the stake and were about to nail his feet, but he said, “Leave me as I am. The one who gives me strength to endure the fire will also give me strength to stay quite still on the pyre, even without the precaution of your nails.” After he had prayed anew, with praise to God for having brought him to this hour, he asked for the grace to partake of the chalice of Christ as a pleasing sacrifice, and enter into eternal life in the immortality of the Holy Spirit, finishing his words with a doxology and amen. They lit the fire, and the Christian eyewitnesses noted in their account of his martyrdom that there was a Eucharistic culmination. They recalled, “When a great flame burst out, those of us privileged to see it witnessed a strange and wonderful thing. Indeed, we have been spared in order to tell the story to others. Like a ship’s sail swelling in the wind, the flame became as it were a dome encircling the martyr’s body. Surrounded by the fire, his body was like bread that is baked, or gold and silver white-hot in a furnace, not like flesh that has been burnt. So sweet a fragrance came to us that it was like that of burning incense or some other costly and sweet-smelling gum.” He entered into the sacrifice of Christ that he had the privilege of celebrating each morning. He lost his life for Christ and would gain it.  We prayed for the same gifts Polycarp displayed at the supreme hour as we opened today’s Mass, begging God to “grant, through [Polycarp’s] intercession, that, sharing with him in the chalice of Christ, we may rise through the Holy Spirit to eternal life.” This is the means by which we, too, may remain faithful to choosing and serving the Lord and never betraying him no matter how long we live.
• Today, with Moses, Jesus and the Church place before us this choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse, between the fruitful tree and the chaff. Mass is the time that we lose our life for him who lost his for us. Mass is where we, like St. Polycarp, are baked into the bread that is transformed into Christ’s body and are made one body, one spirit in Christ and with each other. God so loves the world that he gives us his only Son continuously in our participation in his life-giving death and resurrection in the Eucharist, as we opt to lose our life with him so as to be saved by him forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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