I recently found myself re-reading an old classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, thinking about how I would probably be happy to be locked away for a few years with nothing but C.S. Lewis to read. In this children’s fantasy story (which doubles as an extended allegory about Jesus), we hear an important perspective on the King, Aslan, from his loyal subject, Mr. Beaver, who has an appropriate fear of the Lord. When Lucy asks him if Aslan the lion is safe, the reply comes back “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” This idea of a ruler valuing goodness and strength and uniting them together must be preserved, or else we lose the ability to understand what our relationship with God should be. 
 
While Aslan represents the union of goodness and strength, it is a sad reality of our world that politics, and many of our own private conversations, fall into the trap of separating these two things. Seemingly half the world thinks that everyone is too soft and easily offended, and the other half is given to devaluing strength out of a concern for being nice/polite/kind. These are generalizations, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that many people are pointing fingers across a chasm, unwilling to look at things from another perspective. Jesus, in today’s Gospel, shows us the necessity of seeking the good, speaking the truth, but always doing so in love.  

First, Jesus is not afraid to boldly proclaim the  dangers of sin. It’s so perilous to us that we should be willing to cut off hand, foot, or eye to preserve ourselves from its dangers. In a contemporary  context, Jesus would almost certainly get a few  angry emails about having the audacity to tell people that something, anything, that they are doing might be sinful. It hurts to have our flaws pointed out to us, and we often react out of anger. But it is also clear as day that Jesus points these things out, not to show how He is right and       everyone else is wrong/dumb/the worst, but because He loves them. Even in the intense   moments of the  Gospel when Jesus is forceful and direct, He proclaims sin not in isolation, but always within the context of the possibility of conversion through          God’s grace. 

Unlike most other forms of debate and discourse in today’s world, the point of proclaiming the Gospel  is not to prove that one group is right and another  is wrong. The entire function is to show us more clearly our sins and the dangers they present to the ultimate goal of our salvation, and to demonstrate how God’s grace can call us back from the brink.  We can live without that sin. We can change our lives. We can even live without that foot/hand/eye if that’s the only way. The entire point of condemning sin is to show that humanity is better off without it, and that God’s grace creates the possibility of a different and renewed way of life.

As we hear the prophetic voice of Christ condemning sin and calling us to a new way of life, take a moment to think about our own attachment to sin and how we can overcome it with God’s help. Reflect also on how that healing and conversion in your own life might strengthen you for the cause of speaking the same truth in love to your brothers and sisters in Christ.                                                                      

Prayers Always,
Fr. McC