Mark 9:43-48, The Message - “If your hand or your foot gets in God’s way, chop it off and throw it away. You’re better off maimed or lame and alive than the proud owner of two hands and two feet, godless in a furnace of eternal fire. And if your eye distracts you from God, pull it out and throw it away. You’re better off one-eyed and alive than exercising your twenty-twenty vision from inside the fire of hell.”
In the last reflection, Jesus warned
that it would be better to drown than cause harm to those most vulnerable. He continues in that same hyperbolic vein, musing
that it would be better to be handless, maimed, or short one eye than to wander
away from God’s path. The point, of
course, is that following God might require perhaps even tougher choices than
losing a body part. Sacrifice is at the
very heart of the Christian faith.
This call is hard to swallow in a
culture of excess and comfort. Hear
Dietrich Bonhoffer’s reflections from The Cost of Discipleship:
“To be called to a life of
extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is
indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and
at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to
love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way. To
believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at
the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenseless, preferring to incur
injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves, is indeed a narrow way. To see the
weakness and wrong in others, and at the same time refrain from judging them;
to deliver the gospel message without casting pearls before swine, is indeed a
narrow way. The way is unutterably hard, and at every moment we are in danger
of straying from it. If we regard this way as one, we follow in obedience to an
external command, if we are afraid of ourselves all the time, it is indeed an
impossible way. But if we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, we
shall not go astray.”
Bonhoffer eventually paid for his convictions with his life
as he was executed by the Nazis at Flossenburg concentration camp in 1944 for
his resistance to the practices of Hitler’s regime.
The
bottom line in all of this is that following God is not about getting what we
want. Rather, it is about God having God’s
way in us. The result is that we get
exactly what we most need – a redeemed life that leads us towards the things of
God. What we find is that the things of
God are what we wanted most in the first place, but didn’t know it.
Question: Have you
ever experienced what initially felt like a setback or disappointment, but
later realized it became the very thing that needed to happen for you to get to
a better place?
Prayer: Dear God, be
with us when tough choices come along that challenge our notion of how things
should be. We trust you Lord; help us to
trust you more. Amen.
Prayer Focus: Pray
for all the victims of the winter storms and tornadoes in the past week.
Song: I chose this
song for the chorus, not the verses.
You Can’t Always Get what You Want – The Rolling Stones
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