That's the statement at the heart of the Old Testament reading from Sunday, with the idea that death and life are set before you, so you ought to choose life. Fantastic.
Now, here's a thing, where the choice that is set before you, if it's in those terms, should be an easy choice. It should be straightforward enough, that option, and it's easy for most of us to look at that scene, and say to ourselves 'choose life, well, why wouldn't I?' And when it's in a spiritual sense, we all have in mind that we can choose life quite easily. People have in mind that they can choose life, can decide to follow Jesus, can choose not to sin, can choose a commandment to keep, that sort of thing. People think this about their spiritual lives, but hold the phone there, Jimmy, because think about choices that you make that aren't spiritual.
Think of food. Why does food taste good? Or, more specifically, which food tastes the best? I know we all have different tastes in food, in what we like and what we don't but honestly, the way you can tell something is bad for you is that it tastes good. Ain't that the way. In fact, it can count as a good calorie metric that if you're enjoying the flavour of something you're digesting, then it's probably bad for you, and you should switch out to kale.
It's not just food though. It's all sorts of stuff. You know what you should be doing, drinking eight glasses of water a day, eating whole grains, limiting fats and alcohol, limiting excess sugars, limiting things that taste good or feel good, eating a tiny portion of sawdust every day, with matcha and yerba mate, you know, all that stuff that you are well aware that you should be doing, and yet, you don't end up doing the vast majority of it.
You do what we all do. You have another beer to keep the other three company. You stop by a restaurant on your way home from another restaurant. You go out to 'check the weather' several times a day. You order portions bigger than you need, because the food tastes so good that it doesn't matter if you're hungry or not. You make a long series of bad decisions, that over a long enough time add up. They add up big time. It's not as though one cigarette is going to rot your lungs clean out, but a number of relatively harmless things over a long enough period of time add up. And they can destroy you from the inside out.
Few of us make consistently good lifestyle choices. This is why for the first time essentially ever, life expectancy in the developed world is set to go down. It has always increased before, has always gone up, has always improved. Now, it is set to dip. It's never done that before. And this is a period in history where there aren't the usual outside factors, there aren't the normal things giving us pressure. There's no war, no famine, no pestilence, no plague. We have access to better healthcare than ever, better information than ever, food is super abundant and there's no crisis of where our next meal is going to come from. We have tons of literature about what we should and should not be consuming, so why is it that we are in worse shape than before? Because of our daily choices. Because we smoke and drink and eat for three people. Because we are sedentary, and don't move very far. Because our habits lead to our bodies breaking down. Because we have life and death set before us, and 90% of the time, in bits and pieces, we choose death. Not too many of us would voluntarily choose a firing squad or gas chamber, but we are happy to kill ourselves by degrees, in fits and starts, getting ourselves into death by tiny tiny choices over a long period of time.
If you know you do that physically (yes you do, stop lying), then what makes you think that you don't do that spiritually. If you have the food pyramid and ignore that a whole bunch of times, then what makes the ten commandments or the golden rule any different. Jesus, the great physician, puts it into terms that are quite easy to understand, telling us that if we don't value him above everyone and everything else, if we don't hate our family and renounce all that we have, we can't be his disciples. Cannot be. If we value our families over him on occasion, if we still have house, home, wife, children, shoes clothing and possessions, we cannot be his disciples. With that kind of injunction, which of us can stand? Whom amongst us is making choices good enough to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?
None of us. There is none righteous, not even one. That's sort of the point. That's why Jesus came to earth, that's why he lived and died, was because we were choosing death, consistently. On a daily basis, we were choosing death, we were getting up to bad choices, dreadful options, and leading ourselves down the path to death, destruction and damnation. We knew what we had to do to avoid it, of course, but time after time, we neglected to do it. We neglected to follow through with it, and decided not to. The commandments are there as large as life, and we all know them, have memorized them since we were children. This is the way we are supposed to behave and operate, and we don't. We choose death, and have been from the time of Adam and Eve.
Which is why Jesus. I know that people have a bit of a hard time with the atonement, they have a bit of a complication with Jesus' atoning sacrifice, but it's not that hard to figure out if you think about how you live on a daily basis. Think about your little choices that you make that aren't that good for you. Your small indulgences, the extra cream or extra sugar, the fourth beer or the extra fistful of chips, all that stuff that ain't great for you and you know ain't going to do wonders for your liver or other organs. You know what you should be doing instead, but you decide not to. You and I feel as though the chips are worth the tradeoff, and that a lifetime of eating sawdust and kale, skinless steamed salmon and lentils, it's just not worth it. Life isn't worth living without the little indulgences.
Well, we put ourselves through the wringer with this kind of conduct, you know. We put our bodies through the wringer, and our organs are no exception. Little by little, we wear ourselves down for the purposes of enjoying what's not good for us, and our organs break down because of it. But imagine if you will, there was someone who was making good choices. Only the skinless salmon and chicken breast. No smoking, had never taken a drink. Someone who ate kale and quinoa and never put dressing on his salad. Imagine if this person was going without all these little indulgences and guilty pleasures not because he thought that was a great thing to do, but because he knew that your organs were breaking down because of your decisions. Imagine if this person was keeping himself pristine by clean living not because he was anticipating living a wonderful healthy life, but because he wanted to be ready to donate his organs to you when you needed them. He wanted to donate his organs to you because you wore them out making decisions that benefited you in the short term. This person went without little tiny indulgences their entire lives just so that yours could be better when you needed it.
That's the work that Christ does. His clean living gets imparted to us. His good decisions are what we inherit. We get the benefits of his choices because our were bad. It's not a matter of us making the richt choices, it's a matter of us knowing that the right choices were made for us. I know I keep on bringing it back to this but I think it's important. At the moment of his crucifixion, the soldiers took Jesus' clothes away, and gambled for them. One of them won his tunic. At that moment, Jesus was on the cross, and another man walked away with his robe. Jesus died, and one of the people who killed him walked away looking like Jesus, covered in his robe. That's what happens to us at the confession and absolution, at baptism and the Lord's supper, we are covered with the robe of Christ's righteousness given to us not because we were doing such a great job, but precisely because we weren't.
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