Thursday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time
Two Sundays ago (May 12), Father James Heft gave those gathered at the 11:00 Mass at Immaculate Conception a brilliant homily in which, among other things, he reminded us that the Bible is complicated and that we need to be able to hear when the texts we encounter are hyperbolic. One of the examples he pointed to was the reading before us today. As he put it (I am obviously paraphrasing) is that if all sinners—that is, all of us—were to take Jesus’ commands in Mark’s text literally, we would be reduced to torsos with no appendages and no eyeballs.
If we step back a second, it does seem unreasonable to imagine that the guy who went to the cross to save our souls from eternal torment wants us to cut off our hands and pluck our eyeballs out. Having lived among us, having taken the form of a human being, he surely knew that if we took his words literally, the whole human race would find it impossible to be of much use to themselves or anyone else.
So, if this reading is not, in fact, advocating that we go to the hardware store and purchase an axe or saw so we can get busy cutting off our sinful appendages, what does it mean?
I think the hyperbole here is about underscoring how important it is for us to take our own sin seriously. We’re human. So, as Jesus knows full well, we’ve sinned, and we are going to keep on sinning. And if we can keep that in mind, it keeps us humble. It’s what reminds us that we are definitely not God. It keeps us from turning ourselves or some particular reading of the Bible into an idol.
The big question is: What are we going to do with our sinfulness? We can become self-loathing. Lots of Christians have taken that path over the centuries.
Or we can project our guilt for being sinners onto others. We can imagine that it is they who are sinful, and we that are pure. That doesn’t sound to me particularly honest or in keeping with Jesus’ admonition that we love our neighbor.
Maybe, oddly enough, this passage is about grace. Since Jesus is probably not advocating that we go get that axe or saw, maybe he is putting to us the challenge to examine our human, sinful lives and think about how we might change them. Maybe the hyperbole is about challenging us to think about the ways we daily undermine his commandments—to love our God, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to love even our enemy.
In these days in which some people who call themselves Christian are all about constructing arch enemies, I wonder if what Jesus is saying to us in this reading from Mark is something like—if you can’t follow my commandment to love the Lord your God which means loving even your enemies then you’ve got work to do. I don’t think Jesus really wants you to go get that axe or saw. I do think he wants us all to resist the whole business of culture wars.
—Susan Trollinger