Life and Death: Homily for Thursday, February 19, 2026

Life and death are really intertwined in the spiritual life. Being spiritually dead is bad. Dying to sin is good. Life that is selfish is bad. Life for Jesus is a life well lived. Readings for Today.

Life and Death

As I mentioned at the entrance, death and life are intimately connected. Think, for example, about the reality that we eat dead things in order to stay alive. We give in to the death of sleep in order to rise refreshed to serve God another day. Those of us who are starting to get to a certain point in life where we recognize that the body isn’t what it used to be. We may need glasses or hearing aids. We can’t do physically all the things we used to be able to do. There is a certain dying that comes when we recognize our mortality.

And even in the spiritual life we see the same kind of mixing of death and life. We die to our sin when we are buried in baptism in order to rise to new life. This is the choice that Moses puts before the people, death or life. And in a lot of ways we live in a time where people seem quite content with life, or with death rather. People seem on some level, at least I know that sometimes I am, by seeking the things that pass away and not the things that last forever. Sometimes it can be hard to see the very things that we need to choose life. Sometimes we don’t want to accept that choosing life is difficult, because that’s what Jesus gets at in the gospel. If it were easy, everybody would do it.

But Jesus points out a way of life that we embrace during this season of Lent, that we must deny ourselves. We must take up our cross. We must follow the Lord. And when it is in our life that we seek to save our lives ourselves, we ultimately lose our lives.

This season of Lent is a time where we focus on what is it that keeps us from following Jesus more fully. Of course there are challenges in the midst of this. We do not always see ourselves as we are. That’s the beauty of community. Live in community for a little bit of time and you will get a sense that sometimes others see you more accurately than you see yourself. And sometimes this is painful. There is a certain dying when we recognize that.

Sometimes it is the case that in seeking this great relationship with Jesus, we ourselves think we’re Jesus. We settle for our own reasoning, or we settle for being right, or we settle for being the ones who do something that only we could do. Rather than recognizing that sometimes the value in following Jesus is that we have to die to ourselves so that we can more fully imitate Jesus in our lives. And so this Lent, the choice that Moses sets before the people, is the choice for each one of us. Life or death, which will you choose?

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