Many years ago I celebrated a funeral for a young man in his late twenties. He had suffered from Muscular Dystrophy his whole life. But he was amazing in what he did and how he lived his life. I chose the theme that emerges from our first reading today for that funeral homily. God says in that reading from Sirach: I place before you life and death, water and fire. Choose life that you might live. That young man gave new meaning to those words. Every day he awoke, he had to make a conscious decision to choose life. And consequently he lived his life to the fullest. Certainly he had limitations, but they did not cripple the parts of life he could grab ahold of.

Even that long gospel reading today is a series of situation where people have a choice. Jesus talks about many of the commandments and says we have a choice to either keep them or break them. He says that if we choose to keep them then we shall live; if we choose to break them then we shall die.

As we watch and listen to the Olympics this week, you can’t help but be impressed by the long years of training each of these athletes have endured; and I am sure there were many times when they wanted to stay in bed, or go out on the town, or do anything but practice. They chose, over and over again, to say yes and to embrace their training with an end in sight – these Olympic Games.

Jesus sets before us today the same kind of question: what are the choices we make every day? Do we choose to be His people and reach out to one another in a Christian way; or do we choose to think of ourselves always first and let others fend for themselves?

Probably the answer rests somewhere in between. May today’s scripture reading help us to look at the choices we make and may we continually choose life that we might reach the goal of eternal life.