26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s gospel, Jesus addresses some of his most demanding counsels to his disciples: “if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off!” While there have been Christians who have taken Jesus at his word, most notably the great Church father, Origen, who was rumoured to have castrated himself in order to be able to focus on the things of God and not be distracted by the temptations of the flesh, it should be pretty obvious to us that Jesus is not to be taken literally here. But if we are not to literally hack off our limbs, what it is exactly that Jesus wants us to cut off?

We heard a couple of weeks ago in the gospel that a pre-requisite of wanting to be a disciple of Jesus is the readiness to deny ourselves, pick up our crosses and follow him. Most Christians have managed to do this on a very basic level. Most mature adults have to learn to do this on a very basic level. It comes from the realization that life is not all about fulfilling our own wants and desires. When we agree to follow Jesus, we are agreeing that the basic motivation of the majority of our actions will not be our own pleasure. For example, when we are tempted to simply lie in bed on a Sunday morning, we know how to overcome that pleasure principle and bring our bodies and our desires into line and we get out of bed, get dressed and get the kids ready to come to Church with us. But the pleasure principle, even though it has been largely overcome in our lives, still lurks in the shadows, and we all have our moments of weakness, where we know that it really doesn’t help our cause to give into temptation, but we indulge ourselves and take a bite out of the forbidden fruit, with negative consequences for ourselves and our own spiritual journeys and sometimes with negative consequences for others.

How do we combat this? Well Jesus says if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. I think what Jesus’ teaching means here is that we must be prepared to forgo something that is perfectly good and healthy in our lives if it happens to be the occasion of sin. When Jesus says that we should be prepared to cut off our hand or foot or to pluck out our eye, he is telling us that even though these members of our body are perfectly healthy and good, we should be prepared to do without them if they are leading us into sin. This can be something very hard to accept, because in and of themselves, our hand, our foot and our eye are really useful to us. But Jesus is saying that it is better to forgo the utility and the pleasure that these afford us if by doing so we can assure that we do not end up in eternal hellfire. Now, we said that Jesus is not to be taken literally, and so if we interpret Jesus metaphorically, what is he getting at? Jesus is urging us to be prepared to cut out perfectly heathy things in our lives that might bring us a lot of joy if they also happen to be that which leads us down a path of temptation.

To take a concrete example, watching Netflix is a very good thing in our lives that can bring us entertainment and be a source of much-needed relaxation. However, if we find that watching Netflix is the cause of us going to bed later than we should, such that we deprive ourselves of necessary sleep, meaning that we wake up the next morning grumpy and angry and end up being short-tempered with the people close to us, then perhaps we should consider cutting Netflix out of our lives. We might find this unfair and say to the Lord, but Lord there is nothing wrong with Netflix, it is not a sin to watch Netflix, why are you asking me to give it up? The Lord will respond by saying, well it is better to get by in life with a bit less joy (because of the absence of Netflix) than to have a life filled with Netflix joy but also with anger and grumpiness.

When we look at the lives of many of the saints, a common pattern that emerges is that they went really overboard with their penances at the beginning of their spiritual lives and later in life came to realize the importance of moderation with regard to penitential practices. St. Ignatius is a prime example of such, where, at the beginning of his life he engaged in such extreme fasting that he did lasting damage to his digestion and was to suffer from stomach ulcers for the rest of his life. He calmed down later in life and acknowledged that he probably did not need to go so hard on himself at the beginning of his conversion.

However, his conversion did teach him an important lesson in life, which he offers to us in the rules for the discernment of spirits. He observes that Satan is like an army commander who is attacking a castle. If the queen of the castle (who represents the person being tempted by Satan) rebuffs his attacks in a powerful and absolute way, Satan quickly gives up and goes away to attack someone else. However, if the queen of the castle prevaricates, and only rebuffs Satan’s attacks in a half-hearted way, Satan will know that with a little persistence he will be able to penetrate the defences and take over the castle. I think that this is the lesson that our Lord is trying to drive home in today’s gospel. Moderation is good, but sometimes at the beginning of a spiritual battle a decisive, painful and absolute break with a habit (even an ostensibly good one) can save us from a protracted battle with temptation that we will only ultimately lose.

What we will often find is that although the initial cutting off will be painful, we will discover that we have more real joy than before thanks to the peace that will come into our lives because we no longer have to contend with that major source of temptation. May the Lord grant us the grace and wisdom to know what it is that needs to be cut out of our lives.

Questions for reflection

1. What are the good things in my life that are nevertheless a source of temptation?
2. How much would it really cost me to cut that thing out of my life?
3. What are some of the things that I have given up for Lent? Could it be that the Lord is calling me to give those things up permanently?