Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s readings are demanding in many ways. We are warned of putting off conversion and being caught on “the day of wrath.” Jesus advises that “if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” But the deepest challenge of today’s readings isn’t simply about looming wrath or very difficult demands, their deepest challenge (and gift) lies in their juxtaposition of God’s mercy and wrath, gift and demand.
The reading from Sirach follows upon yesterday’s passage that described how Wisdom bestows joy, honor, and security; but through the winding ways of life’s trials and ordeals. Wisdom’s gifts are abundant, but not obtainable on the cheap.
Today’s reading continues this same insight. Wisdom’s peace is unlike the selfish peace of the world. Money, the fulfillment of appetites, power – conventional ways of measuring success and happiness – provide no true security or fulfillment. The text demands conversion, warning against shallow trust in God’s mercy with its most disturbing line: “mercy and anger alike are with him.”
This image can easily be distorted into a vision of a capricious God who offers mercy as long as we fulfill his demands, but whose wrath is an ever-present threat should we not toe the line. The biblical God is not capricious, but demanding. It is not that we must choose between the blessings and curses of God, but that God’s gift of salvation is itself a demanding form of life.
This was one of the great insights of ancient Israel. The Lord had liberated them from Egypt and provided a land flowing with milk and honey. Thus, they could not be like other peoples thinking of their good alone. As an enslaved people liberated by God, they were to live this salvation by showing special concern for the widows and orphans, the poor, and aliens, “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Ex 22:21
Security tempted Israel to think their prosperity and safety came from their own power. To trust in themselves was to forget the great grace God had shown them and to ignore the demands of the covenant. Many of us know a version of this temptation in our own lives. We pray in times of crisis, but grow self-centered when life is good.
In this context we can think about the disturbing unity of God’s mercy and anger. God’s mercy is the boundless, endless, ever present desire for us to be fully alive. God’s mercy is not about God being willing to overlook our failures and fallings, but about God’s refusal to let us and the world remain fallen. God calls us to the fullness of life.
Thus, boundless mercy is also blazing wrath at the destructive sins we continue to embrace and the evil that burdens the world. The fullest love demands life for the beloved. God calls us to the hard-earned fullness of wisdom. The fulfillment of discipleship is precisely the demanding freedom to live in the fullness of life.
The Gospel reading from Mark revisits these themes in a collection of sayings from Jesus. These verses come immediately after Jesus’s second prediction of his Passion in Mark. Not only do the disciples not understand Jesus’s talk of his Passion, they are soon arguing amongst themselves about who among them is the greatest. Ignoring the cross, they could not comprehend the Kingdom.
Jesus speaks of the great demands of the Kingdom – that seem to call for impossible sacrifices – of hands, feet and eyes. Jesus speaks of being “salted by fire.” Many read this as a reference to the salting of sacrifices called for in Leviticus 2:13. Jesus points the disciples away from worldly power to the demanding sacrifices--the crosses--each one of them (and us) will have to bear. Indeed, the Gospel reading ends by identifying the salt of sacrifice with Christian life – warning against salt that loses its flavor and admonishing disciples to “have salt in yourselves.”
Salt and fire, sacrifice and cross…what conversion, what fullness of life is God calling us to in today’s readings?
Vincent Miller