Thursday in the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time

Using computers comes naturally to kids.  They even think in computer language.  One young boy, learning the Lord’s Prayer, said at the end, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail.”  That can happen to us as well and cause us to miss what Jesus is really saying.     

To deliver us from evil Jesus said, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.  If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off.”  We don’t take these words literally of course, because evil doesn’t come from of our hands, feet, or eyes, but from our hearts.  So, for years I took this saying of Jesus as a metaphor to resist the unruly passions of my heart, to guard my thoughts and practice mortification. 

But I was missing the full gravity of his words.  Jesus is calling us to follow him on the road to Calvary where he experienced the ultimate struggle with evil, where he suffered not just the loss of a hand or a foot or an eye, but his whole body, where he died by crucifixion.

When St. Mark wrote this gospel for Christians in Rome they were suffering severe persecution under the emperor Nero.  Peter had been crucified, Paul had been beheaded.  Some Christians were being burned as lanterns to light the paths through Nero’s gardens at night.  For the early Christians cutting off a hand, or plucking out an eye was a metaphor not for lesser sacrifices but for an even greater sacrifice, that of life itself.  We would rather die than be cut off from Christ.  

Our final deliverance from evil will not be an escape from dying, but an escape by dying, so that we can enter the kingdom of heaven. We should pray for that grace as Jesus taught us when he said, “Watch at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Lk. 21:36).