People who get a little tweaked at rules and the "Thou shalt nots" that the Church has conveyed to us over the centuries often say, "Why don't we just pay heed to the Sermon on the Mount?" When they do so, they are thinking of the Beatitudes, the verses which state how blessed are the meek, the mournful, the merciful, etc. are and how they form the Kingdom of God. They may think of the Golden Rule (delivered elsewhere, mind you), loving God and neighbour with their whole heart.
In our readings for Mass today (click *here* to read them), we have another part of the Sermon on the Mount which people have (conveniently) forgotten. Here Jesus gets very grim indeed, going beyond the Pharisees by noting that even the mental entertainment of the sin is indeed the sin itself (and who hasn't wanted to smack someone else into oblivion?), and that it is better to cut one's appendages off than stay intact and slide right into Hell.
Ouch.
Did He mean that literally? Do I go so far as to pull out my eye?
What He means here is taking every means possible to avoid sin. The sin is in the heart of the individual, in the thoughts and desires fanned into "life". The eye is just the means of conveying an image that the self takes and obsesses over, creating the sin. It's just as easy to conceive of the sin after digging one's eye out of its orbit. The hand is just the means of striking someone or reaching out to take something that the self has desired, creating the sin. It is just as easy to conceive of the sin after chopping one's hand off its arm. The sin is in the heart, it is in the mind, and one could eliminate all senses and chop one's self to bits and sin still lurks at the door. What then?
The desert ascetics wrote and spoke frequently of denying one's self and mortifying (putting to death) the flesh. Their ideas was that it is in the practice of self-denial and the avoiding of the "near occurrence" of sin that they could virtually cut off the avoiding member. They strove to remake their minds as St. Paul enjoined to conform to the mind of Jesus. The idea behind that is to remove one's self from the temptation so they could rebuild themselves without having to fight the impulses all the time and actually have time to pray, to read, to serve the least of these the Lord called us to care for.
So the next time we encounter a temptation, let us ask ourselves how we got there in the first place. Is there something different we could have done not to be there? Is there some activity that put us there that we can remove from our lives? If we remove these distractions, perhaps we can start to grow without them wearing us down, without us in a weak moment think, "What if?" and conceiving the sin, for once conceived it exists, even if we do nothing else. Perhaps then we will have cut off what offends so that we become truly children of the Kingdom of God.
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