"Cutting off" our hand

Thursday, February 23, 2017

“Delay not your conversion to the Lord.” (Sirach 5:8)

Stern readings at Mass today. Sirach 5 lists a number of things which, in the long run, are useless when it comes to our righteousness before the Lord:

--wealth

--strength and power

--presumption

--overconfidence in the Lord’s forgiveness

Despite all we have spoken about and reflected upon during the Year of Mercy just past, we cannot keep sinning, presuming that we are already forgiven. God is merciful, yet at the same time He is just. We believe that mercy triumphs over justice, and Jesus demonstrated that many times during His earthly ministry, but that doesn’t mean we can simply presume that we will get away with anything and everything. Sirach makes that clear:

. . . mercy and anger alike are with him;

   upon the wicked alights his wrath. (5:7)

And in today’s Gospel (Mark 9:41-50) Jesus, with radical imagery, advises us to eliminate from our lives anything that causes us to sin. Some of us will remember the old Act of Contrition, in which we pledge to “avoid the near occasion of sin.” As Lent approaches, we do well to put those words into action in our lives. Jesus tells us to pluck out our eye or cut off our hand, and we hope that He is simply using extreme images that can be taken as metaphors. But the message is firm: eliminate what causes us to sin.

I’ll give you a personal example about how things are going in my own life. Ever since the Inauguration of President Trump in the USA, I have been obsessively checking the news and news sources on the Internet, trying to keep track of what is going on in our government. Many Americans have been doing the same during what so many of us see as trying times. But I tried a little experiment: for a few days now, I’ve stopped following what’s been going on, mainly because I realized that my stress and anxiety levels have gone up along with frustration and anger and lack of patience. And so I cut it out, greatly limiting my contact with the news each day. I have experienced an immediate result. And so I find myself less prone to sins of thought and action, since my lack of patience obviously affects those who have to live with me.

Hopefully, you can find some personal ways to cut off what needs to be eliminated from your own life. Don’t forget to ask for help in this endeavor, for the Lord will readily answer such prayers.

God bless you!