Numbers 11:25-29
Psalm 19:8, 10, 12-14
James 5:1-6
Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48
Our readings this weekend,
especially the pericopes from the Letter of St. James and the Gospel of Mark,
could be simply summed up in two simple words: sin matters.
In the past few decades there has
been a great emphasis and growth in devotion to the Divine Mercy of God. With
the revelations of Our Lord to St. Faustina last century there came the Divine
Mercy chaplet, novena and, with Blessed John Paul II’s support, the Divine
Mercy feast on the Sunday after Easter. Rightly so, our world today needs to be
reminded of God’s great love for us and the fact that no matter how far we
might stray from Him or what sin we might commit, He is always ready and
willing to welcome us back home. But just as the Lord implants that reminder of
His mercy into our hearts, so also does the devil. It seems strange to say that
the devil would remind us of God’s infinite mercy, but it is quite true. In the
midst of temptations and inclinations to sin, one old piece of spiritual advice
is to reflect on how it will grieve the Lord and how sin wounds our
relationship with the Lord. But the devil likes to keep us from doing that or
to push those thoughts out of our mind. Rather in the midst of temptation he
quietly whispers, “But God loves you so much. He understands that you’re not
perfect. And hey, you can always go to confession. He’s so merciful that He
would never turn you away.” He says these things hoping to instill in us a
knowledge that we can always turn back later, despite falling into sin in the
moment. And that knowledge is often the thing that we use as permission to sin;
we know we can be forgiven and so we take advantage of that Mercy and actually
commit a sin called presumption – presuming that we will be forgiven and doing
things anyway knowing that we can just confess it later. The interesting thing,
though, is that as soon as we fall into sin, the devil’s story changes
instantly. No longer are we reminded of God’s mercy but instead are to recall
God’s justice: “Look what you’ve done. You’ve given up again. You’ve let God
down. Not like it’s new…look at all the other times that you’ve done it before.
You are so far from being what He wants you to be.” And in this he hopes to
bring us to despair, at which point we forget the mercy and give ourselves over
to sin.
In response to this the Lord
gives us a rather vivid and violent image about cutting off limbs and gouging
out eyes. Imagine hold a meat cleaver to your hand and trying to get up the
courage to cut it off – it would be painful, it would take an great amount of
trust and commitment, and it would be emotionally intense. But the thing is
that the Lord doesn’t want us to actually cut off limbs and gouge out eyes,
because the sin doesn’t come from outside. As we heard a few weeks ago, sin
comes from our hearts, from the interior.
We must be willing to allow sin to be cut out from our heart and our
life if we want to attain eternal life; it will be painful, it will be
emotional, and it will surely take great commitment and trust. So we must ask
God for the grace to cut sin out from our lives. And He rejoices to give us
that grace because He knows the effects of sin because He felt them in every
wound of His Sacred Body during the Passion, most especially on the Cross. He
longs to bring us healing and to keep us from sin. Moreover, He desires to keep
us from the final reward of sin – Hell.
When the Lord gives that image of
Gehenna, it would have spoken quickly to the Jewish people because Gehenna was
a real place. Outside the city of Jerusalem there was a huge valley where they
would burn the refuse from the community, as well as the corpses of animals and
criminals. Because there was always something being tossed in here and there
the valley was a smoldering put of death that was less than pleasant to be
around. And even though it is only a shadow of how bad Hell would be for us,
the image is well-conveyed: it is to be avoided at all costs.
The other image that Our Lord
uses is that of the millstone being tied around ones neck as they are cast into
the sea. Another vivid image, the Lord uses it so remind us that while we must
be clean from all sin personally, it is not only for our benefit. None of us is
an island unto ourselves and while we might think our sins are private and
don’t affect anyone else, they in fact impact everyone else. Every time I come
to this passage I can’t help but think about a specific instance in my own
life. When I was a teenager I was a less-than-pleasant person to be around. I
dressed in all mostly black clothes, wore lots of chains and bracelets,
listened to immoral and even satanic music, and had an absolutely negative
outlook on nearly everything. Suffice it to say I was not the best model to
follow after, but the problem is that one person did. A relative of mine looked
up to me and began to listen to the same music, dress the same, think the same,
and imitate other undesirable traits of mine. I eventually converted to the
faith and came out of that, but my relative hasn’t fully done so yet. And to be
honest, I have a bit of fear in my heart that on my judgment day one of the
things that Lord will question me about will be that relationship – why I
wasn’t a better model, and how my sins led astray one of his little ones.
That’s my own personal situation but all of us have them in some fashion. When
parents and godparents have children baptized they agree that they will do
everything in their power to raise their children up in the faith and yet when
I go to help on retreats or at PSR classes, when children disagree with the
Church on things like sexual morality, obligation to attend Mass on Sundays,
and other things, quite often their response to why they shouldn’t be worried
is because their parents aren’t. They’re not receiving the guidance positive
witness they need. In reality, it’s not just parents and godparents either –
it’s all of us, young and old and everywhere in between. Every single one of us
has someone in the world that looks to us for some sort of example. It could be
a relative, a friend, a coworker, or a random person we don’t really know, but
they are either built up or torn down because of the actions that we commit.
And woe to us is we are tearing them down!
In the end, we have an obligation
to fight against sin if we want to get to Heaven. So while sin matters, grace conquers. And as Catholics we have a
lot of tools in our spiritual bags to help us receive that conquering grace. We have the saints of God
to intercede for us. We have the Archangels and our guardian angels to watch
over us. We have the sacraments to sustain us. But most of all, we have the
Lord God dwelling within and among us. In our first reading we hear the Jewish
people running to Moses to make him stop the elders from prophesying after
receiving the Spirit of God. To this Moses simply responds ‘Would that we all
would prophesy! Would that we all had the Spirit!’ At Pentecost the Spirit
descended upon the whole Church, not just a select few. In our baptism we each
received Him personally into our souls. It is now for us to listen to His voice
and follow where He desires us to go, cutting out the sin that needs to be cut
out and thus becoming the witnesses we were created to be – not only for
ourselves, but for our children and for our world.
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