In Deuteronomy 30:19-20, God presents
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. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
In Deuteronomy, God calls on Israel to make a choice which will affect her own destiny as a nation, and the consequences of her various choices (which see her lurching from idolatry to fidelity, from the choice of death to the choice of life, from curse to blessing) is the major theme of the "Deuteronomic History" (i.e. those historical books of the Old Testament – Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings – which reflect the theological emphases of Deuteronomy).
In today’s Office of Readings, St Ignatius of
All things have an end, and two things, life and death, are side by side set before us, and each man will go to his own place. Just as there are two coinages, one of God and the other of the world, each with its own image, so unbelievers bear the image of this world, and those who have faith with love bear the image of God the Father through Jesus Christ. Unless we are ready through his power to die in the likeness of his passion, his life is not in us.
For St Ignatius, choosing life is now a question not of God’s temporal and political blessing (as it was for the Deuteronomists) but of sharing in the life of Christ, which we do by conforming ourselves (in one way or another) with his passion and by receiving his life-giving blessing in the Eucharist, so that eventually we might enter not into an earthly Promised Land but into the heavenly Promised Land of eternal life – the fullness of life in Christ.
Image: Icon of the Martyrdom of St Ignatius
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