The twenty-sixth Sunday of Year B brings one of the most shocking statements of Jesus that can be found in the gospels. If we take these words literally, it seems that those who are to follow Jesus need to cut off their arms, their feet and to pluck their eyes out. As he says, if those things make us sin, we need to separate ourselves from them in a radical way in order to avoid eternal damnation. Well, it doesn’t sound very appealing to our modern sensitivity. But what does that really mean?

Our society adores and idolizes any form of physical beauty and strength. We see it everywhere around us: in media, commercials, in beauty salons, gyms, etc. In this aspect it is very alike to the people of the ancient world who also valued highly the physical beauty and external appearances. Perhaps that is why we find Jesus’ words so difficult for us to accept.

However, these words were even more shocking for Jesus’ listeners. If we remember that the law of Moses required of those who served God in the temple to be free from any physical defects that what Jesus is teaching is exactly contradicts the precepts of the Torah. Even sacrifices presented in the temple had to be blameless before being offered to God. And here Jesus seems to say, if you want to serve me, you need to make yourself handicapped in some way.

The disciples who listened to these words remembered them well and that is why they recorded them later in their gospels. As we know Jesus used at times this strong way of speaking to convey and to stress the importance of his message: avoid at any cost all that what lead you away from God and from life. Perhaps for some of us Jesus exaggerates, but at the same time, he knows well his disciples, our human weakness, and the gift of life that he brings to the world.

In the end, it is not physical mutilation that Jesus is promoting, but a radical conversion of the spirit. As we heard it in the gospel reading a few weeks ago, it is the human heart that is the root of all evil in the world, and that human heart must be cured and reformed. After the fall of Adam and Eve, we desperately searching for life in everything that we do making of them an idol. In this way we forget that only God is the true and lasting source of our happiness. Due to our sinfulness, our spirits have become sterile and unable to produce good fruits.

In this gospel Jesus reminds us that he is the only healer of our souls, he is the only one who can create our hearts anew. That is why he invites us to lean on him in our daily struggles with ourselves and with various temptations of life. In the end Jesus is strong enough to hear us of our weaknesses.