The difficult, and at times,
harsh, readings today boil down to an ultimate choice – eternal life and the
means to get there. The readings do give us a positive teaching that no
generous life goes unrewarded, but also that no persistent selfish sinful way
of life goes unpunished. We are given rather stark images of amputation and
organ removal rather than to commit sins with them.
Any reasonable minded person can see that these drastic measures in
Jesus’ teaching are not to be taken literally – yet the Gospel in its entirety
contains passages like this one that do not sit easily with us.
It would not be the complete Gospel without
this passage which we find deeply troubling and disturbing – regarding
potential resorting to amputation and the like to avoid sinning with our limbs
and organs! So what are we to make of the difficulty? We might say to ourselves
– this is terrible thinking, and ‘old school’. But we cannot ‘pick and choose in Christ’ (St
Paul).
Jesus was teaching for effect. Stark
images and imagery make a deep impression on us. If we think of the best
teachers at school who made a subject interesting and memorable it was their
passion and their powers of persuasion. Their conviction was convincing. But they
also used memorable stories and life lessons to hammer home their point.
There is a disturbing truth therefore
in Jesus’ sayings today and that is the awfulness of sin and sin’s potential to
exclude us from eternal happiness with God in heaven. Scandal and occasions of
sin are to be ‘avoided like the plague’.
Firstly, ‘scandal’.
The term ‘scandal’ is used rather
more generally today than its original meaning as a stumbling block (’skandalon’ in Greek). It was to perform
a nasty piece of work to trip somebody up in their progress. It was an act of
cruelty committed out of resentment and envy to take someone down a peg or two.
Scandal is the deliberate intention to place a
building block in someone’s way, to trip them up and to cause them to fall. It involves
malicious intent. It is better not to have been born at all than to live a life
where we lead others into sin and possible damnation. The heart that desires to
perform scandal to cause others to sin is truly evil. We seem to have lost the
sense that we can speak , act and even dress ‘scandalously’. It is worth thinking
about.
Occasions of sin are where we must be careful and have to avoid the
deliberate decision to place ourselves ‘in harm’s way’. It may be the work of
others to trip us up but like a minefield we must be on our guard and aware of
the potential dangers to ourselves and keep away from all dangers to fall into
sin – with our eyes for example – lust and covetousness and evil desires – and with
our limbs – such as thievery or violence. We know our capacity to sin, we know
our weaknesses and our potential to make wrong choices in life, to compromise
our principles, to rationalise and make excuses for ourselves with sayings like
’just this once’ or ‘one more drink won’t do me any harm’ or ‘this rule does
not apply to me’. We deliberate and we fall down.
Repentance is needed. The remedy to such self-delusion and selfishness
is implied in the line regarding generosity – receiving a prophet’s reward for
the offer of a cup of cold water. We must therefore turn from selfishness and
be generous with our resources – this does not go unnoticed by the Lord who is
quite ready to reward us for our acts of kindness, especially to those who
represent Him.
Therefore while the thrust of the
readings is on the dangers on the moral and spiritual plane - even spiritual
jealousy and resentment at others’ success and others getting ahead - we are called
to greater generosity of spirit just
as God is generous with His Spirit.
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