Who wouldn't choose life and prosperity: Homily for Thursday, March 6, 2025

It seems like such an easy choice. Death and doom or Life and prosperity. And yet, during this season of Lent, we need to ask who wouldn’t choose life and prosperity. Readings for today.

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Who wouldn’t choose life and prosperity

At first glance, the question posed or the suggestion given seems rather easy to follow. What kind of a choice is it really? Life and prosperity, death and doom. Who wouldn’t want life and prosperity? How is it possible that we would want death and doom?

It seems like such an obvious choice. But it isn’t. Because we know from the gospel that sometimes the choice for life and prosperity is not exactly what it seems. But it’s not easy in one way, because it requires us to recognize, first of all, the always present importance of God.

It means, for example, that we can’t really just look at ourselves, our desires, our wants, and automatically conclude that we’re choosing life. In fact, Jesus makes this abundantly clear in the gospel.

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. And so the difficulty of choosing life is that it involves placing our faith completely in God, recognizing that just because we want something does not mean we should have it.

In fact, the season of Lent is, I think, always an opportunity for us to examine our choices and to see how often it is we choose God, who is life and prosperity, or whether or not we choose something else.

We can be tempted to choose those things that bring immediate pleasure, whether it’s immediate pleasure in the sense of the next few minutes or immediate pleasure in the sense of our lives.

Today we’re challenged to choose life, which means choosing God. But the pathway to this is not always easy. For those without faith, and I would argue those without hope, this life is everything. This life is completely all there is.

And so people whose hopes are set on this life, as St. Paul tells us, are the most pitiable of people. And they spend much of their life seeking to preserve this life, this life with all of its brokenness, this life with all of its hardships or difficulties, this life with the very things that cause us to question, question God’s existence, try to discover what the role and place of God is when we wrestle with the question of evil in the world.

But we are not the most pitiable of people, because we recognize that to choose life and prosperity is really to choose the resurrection of Jesus, which could only be obtained through the pathway of the cross.

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