26^th Sunday in O.T.; Sept. 30, 2018

Num 11:25-29   Ps 19   Jas 5:1-6   Mk 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48

Deacon Jim McFadden; (New) Folsom Prison; SJB

 

            In 2010 there was a film, 127 Hours, starring James Franco, about the outdoorsman Aron Ralston who fell into a crevice while on a canyoneering venture in southeastern Utah. His right forearm was pinned underneath a boulder, which trapped him for five days and 7 hours (127 hours). He laid there for several days trying to extricate himself from the rock, but to no avail. Finally, convinced that he would die of exposure, he grabbed a small, dull pocketknife out of his backpack and began to cut off his own arm. Despite unspeakable pain, he completed the task. Ralson tied a crude tourniquet around the stump of his arm and made his away through the remainder of the canyon, in which he had to rapple down a 65-foot sheer cliff face to reach safety. He came to a road where he flagged down a car.

Some months after this terrible ordeal, he appeared on the David Letterman Show, where he told his story, which spellbound the audience. When he finished, the normally light-hearted and sarcastic Letterman become unusually serious. Looking at his guest intently, he said with great admiration, “You know something about life that I don’t.”

            Why tell you this horrible, yet fascinating tale on the 26^th Sunday of Ordinary Time? Because in the Gospel Jesus speaks with incredible bluntness about cutting off ones hand, ones foot; about plucking out ones eye. If these things become a block to salvation, get rid of them, he says; better to enter eternal life maimed, than going to Gehenna with all your members intact.

These are hard, blunt, surprising words But, are we to take a literal, fundamentalist understanding of them? I think not. In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas laid the foundation of modern biblical interpretation by recognizing that the Bible is packed with rich symbolic language, which communicates special meaning regarding what Jesus actually said. So, he distinguished between the literal sense of a passage—what the words of Scripture actually say; that is, the obvious meaning of the text. Then he noted that there is a spiritual sense of a passage that goes beyond the literal sense of the words to consider the religious meaning, conveyed symbolically.

So, I don’t think Jesus is encouraging us to cut off our hands or feet or pluck out our eyes. At the same time, we are being challenged to look at this teaching with a certain spiritual seriousness.   We should not be to blasé over the language Jesus is using. “Oh, our Lord, is only exaggerating; He’s just using metaphors to get our attention. “ Rather, I would caution us to read this passage through the lens of Aron Ralston and his experience.   Look, Ralston found himself in mortal danger because his arm was pinned underneath a boulder. So desperate was his situation that he judged quite rightly that he’d have to sacrifice an essential part of his body in order to save his life. He knew that something drastic had to be done and he was willing to pay the price, despite the pain, to do it.

Does it ever occur to us that we can be in a similar kind of spiritual situation in which we are in danger—that, if we don’t do something drastic, that we could die spiritually? Indeed, we could be in mortal danger, pinned, as it were, under a “rock.” Jesus is warning us of spiritual dangers, of spiritual warfare, of spiritual death, and the drastic things we’ve got to do in order to save our spiritual lives.

O.K., what are the three things that Jesus identifies? (1) If you’re hand causes trouble, cut it off; (2) if your foot is your problem, off with it; (3) if your eye is your problem, pluck it out. Look at these three things from a spiritual standpoint.

Take the first one: your hand is the member by which we grasp and take things. In the course of our lives, we take and grasp for all sorts of things: money, pleasure, sex, power, prestige, security, and comfort. Go all the way back to the Book of Genesis in which our original parents grasped for the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil. They grasped at godliness but without God! From the beginning our hands are a problem because they grasp what the ego wants.

What are you grasping at in the course of your life? –worldly things, worldly honor, creating benefits for yourself and pleasures. Is that grasping putting you in spiritual danger, keeping you from receiving the one thing essential which is God’s own Life?   Are you willing to cut that attachment off, cut it out of your life? You may be thinking, “Oh, deacon, there’s no way I could live without _______” and fill in the blank: riches power, pleasures, honor, etc. No way, deacon, could I live without these things. If so, perhaps your grasping has pinned you down, and is keeping you from being fully alive.

In the second reading today from the letter of James, we hear a very blunt criticism of the rich. James lampoons rich people for all the things they’ve grasped: gold, silver, luxury, and pleasure. Are you perhaps compromised by this form of spiritual grasping and are you willing to cut this out of your life in order to save your life?

What’s the second thing Jesus talks about?—he speaks of cutting off your foot. If your foot is your problem, cut it off. What’s the foot but the member why which we walk, by which we set ourselves on a definite path. We’re meant spiritually to talk towards God, who is the goal of our life. Aquinas said that if you want to find joy, walk the path that leads to God alone.

What do we do with so much of our lives?—we walk down errant paths; we chose paths that move us away from God. Again, the paths that lead us to wealth and consumerism, status and prestige, control and dominance, and hedonistic pleasure. Very early in life we get on these paths and we walk and we walk. As we get older, we may pick up the pace because we don’t have too much time left; so, we accumulate more and more, thereby moving us in the wrong direction. How many stories are there in the spiritual tradition that are about paths, roads, ways of life, etc.? Think of Dante’s Divine Comedy which begins “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost” (The Inferno, Dante Alighieri, Canto 1).

So, if your foot is your problem, cut it off. What does that mean spiritually? If you’re walking along the wrong road, you must be willing to cut that out, to change direction, to set off on the right path. Oh, this is hard stuff, brothers; I know it and you know it. This is “rubber hitting the road” spirituality. You may be thinking, “You mean, deacon, this road that I’ve been walking most of my life, where I’ve devoted most of my energies, is the wrong one?” Yes! And, you must be willing to abandon it, to cut it off.

Finally, Jesus speaks of the eye. If it is your problem, pluck it out. What’s the eye but the organ of vision. Saints Augustine and Aquinas both say that the Beatific Vision is to “see” God face to face. The goal of the spiritual life is a knowledge of God, a love of God, of seeing very deep into the very essence of God. That means that the spiritual life is a constant seeking and seeing the things of God.

Unfortunately, most of us spend most of our lives looking at all the wrong places—we’re looking after, seduced by the goods of the world whether inside or outside of prison. If your eye is your problem, pluck it out. Take that challenge with spiritual urgency. If you’ve been looking in the wrong places, if you’ve been intrigued and beguiled by the wrong things, you must be willing to eliminate that thing from your life. You must be willing to do something drastic to deal with it

Brothers, in recent years, we’ve lost a since of urgency with the spiritual life. Somehow, Catholic spirituality has become soft, too easy: “God is love, God is my friend; therefore, whatever I do will be forgiven; so, it really doesn’t matter what I do.”

Yes, we will be forgiven if we seek it But, the spiritual life is the consummate high adventure: it’s demanding. In St. Paul’s language, an athlete is willing to sacrifice all sorts of things to win a perishable crown. What are willing to sacrifice, to cut drastically out of our lives in order to gain eternal life? That’s the hard questions raised by the challenging language of the Lord Jesus.

Amen.