May 19: The Word is Always Present Offering Life and Love

Coppo di Marcovaldo (1225-74): Hell
Baptistery, Florence

Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Gospel: Mark 9:41-50

“It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched (NRSV, Mark 9:47b-48).’”

Father, over the centuries the religious imagination has attempted to visualize what it means to reject you, to choose evil rather than good. Finally nothing could be worse that the realization that no matter how much we might try to flee you that you are always there in your Word offering us forgiveness and new life. Father, you do not know anger, a human vice, but only love.

That, Father, is the worst of punishments: to reject love but yet to be pursue by it, love always present to the sinner, always offered by the Word whose very being there is a defining element of one’s humanity. The sinner may reject you, Father. In freedom he may turn to evil but he can never remove himself from your presence through the Word always offering love and forgiveness.

Father, may we never surrender to the temptation of sin and always embrace your life and love offered to us through your Word, now made flesh in our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.