This week’s gospel is tough. This is one of the ones that is really easy to brush off and ignore, but we do so to our own peril. It is the difficult passages of the Biblical text that we must engage with more seriously than the ones that are nice or (seemingly) easy to understand.
To have Jesus to tell us to pluck out our eyes, or cut off our hands is, to say the least, a bit distressing, but look how he begins that part of the passage: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones…” (By the way, the Greek word for stumbling block is “skandalon” the same place we get the English word “scandal”.) Jesus does not accuse us of making human mistakes or having faults and weaknesses. Jesus is talking about when we intentionally put the scandal in front of others, when we make them stumble and fall. Now I don’t usually say that others can “make” us do things but there are times when traps have been laid and snares set and we can be made to fall in or we can make others fall in. This is the case Jesus brings to us this week.
If we are so calloused and hard-hearted as to lay a trap for our neighbor, in order to make it right, in order for us “to enter life” we may need to give up so much self-righteousness, so much ego, that it will indeed feel like removing a hand, or giving up the eye that caused us to sin in the first place. Jesus does not promote self-harm. Period. End of sentence. What Jesus is articulating here is more akin to a gardener suggesting how to prune a rose or an arborist removing dead limbs from an overgrown tree. If we do not do the self-care that keeps us healthy, or salty as Jesus says, we can find ourselves ingrown and overgrown, lashing out or setting stumbling blocks for others. It is always easier to trim a tree before it falls on your neighbor’s house than to clean up the mess afterward.
Let’s take some time this week to think about where we can trim our overgrown branches or soften our hardened hearts, individually and communally, so we can be the salty people Jesus needs us to be, and then let’s actually work on those changes. Let’s be people who are at peace.
St. Augustine's Chapel 