If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you; if you trust in God, you too shall live
What a fantastic synopsis of our call and the promise of obedience.
We have a choice, to keep God’s commandments and trust in God or to refuse Him. If we make the right choice, we are saved and secure. We have eternal life. If we do not, well the alternative is awful.
The prophet Sirach goes on with his very clear explanation of choices and outcomes: Before man are life and death, good and evil, whichever he chooses shall be given him.
Throughout Old Testament history God keeps appealing to His people concerning the choices they are making. This is because they were going through the motions without being internally changed. We heard it on the first day of the year on the Solemnity of the Circumcision. Circumcise your hearts. Do not just rely on a merely physical change but be changed throughout.
Today we enter the Pre-Lenten season a beautiful and often forgotten time of spiritual preparation leading us toward Lent. For centuries, the Church used these weeks to slow the pace, quiet the heart, and begin reflecting on repentance, mortality, and God’s mercy before the intensity of Lent begins.
This special time has been preserved in our Holy Church and serves to remind us that conversion is not rushed – it is prepared for, prayed over, and received with an open heart.
We are called to use this time to examine our lives, deepen our prayer, and allow God to prepare our hearts for the journey to our Easter lives.
In Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, He calls us to profound change. He makes God’s Law clear. It is not the mere doing of 613 things, but rather a complete conversion of self. We read Jesus’ commandments and say – well that is hard.
Of course, it is hard if we are not changed people. But if we are changed, converted, and new if our faith in Christ Jesus we can do all He asks of us and do it easily. We can be reconciled, put aside our lusts, and live with integrity in all we do and say.
