Daily Mass Gospel Reflection- Severing sin for Salvation

Friends, in our Gospel, Jesus speaks, with incredible bluntness, about cutting off one’s hand and foot and plucking out one’s own eye. If these things are a block to your salvation, get rid of them, for it is better to enter life maimed than to enter Gehenna with all of your limbs and members.

The hand is the organ by which we reach out and grasp things. The soul is meant for union with God, but instead we have reached out to creatures, grasping at finite things with all of our energies.

The Lord also speaks of the foot. The foot is the organ by which we set ourselves on a definite path. We are meant to walk on the path which is Christ. Do we? Or have we set out down a hundred errant paths, leading to glory, honor, power, or pleasure?

We are designed to seek after and look for God. Have we spent much of our lives looking in all the wrong places, beguiled by the beauties and enticements of this world? And are we willing to pluck out our eye spiritually, to abandon many of the preoccupations that have given us pleasure?

+++Jesus said to his disciples:
“Anyone who gives you a cup of water
to drink
because you belong to Christ,
amen, I say to you, will surely not
lose his reward.

“Whoever causes one of these little
ones who believe in me to sin,
it would be better for him if a
great millstone
were put around his neck
and he were thrown into the sea.
If your hand causes you to sin, cut
it off.
It is better for you to enter into
life maimed
than with two hands to go into
Gehenna,
into the unquenchable fire.
And if your foot causes you to sin,
cut if off.
It is better for you to enter into
life crippled
than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna.
And if your eye causes you to sin,
pluck it out.
Better for you to enter into the
Kingdom of God with one eye
than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna,
where their worm does not die, and
the fire is not quenched.

“Everyone will be salted with fire.
Salt is good, but if salt becomes insipid, Keep salt in yourselves and you will
have peace with one another.”+++

Go creep on someone else please...

hand
anatomy

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica •

hand,
grasping organ at the end of the forelimb of certain vertebrates that exhibits great mobility and flexibility in the digits and in the whole organ. It is made up of the wrist joint, the carpal bones, the metacarpal bones, and the phalanges. The digits include a medial thumb (when viewed with the palm down), containing two phalanges, and four fingers, each containing three phalanges.

or·gan

(ōr'găn) [TA]

A differentiated structure or part of a system of the body; composed of tissues and cells; exercises a specific function (e.g., respiration, secretion, digestion).
Synonym(s): organum [TA] , organon.

[L. organum, fr. G. organon, a tool, instrument]

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