When Howard Carter found the tomb of King Tutankhamen, he and his crew opened up his casket and found another within it.
They opened up the second, which was covered with gold leaf, and they found a third. Inside the third casket was a fourth made of pure gold. The Pharaoh’s body was in the fourth, wrapped in gold cloth with a gold face mask. But when the body was unwrapped, it was leathery and shriveled.
Whenever we try to cover up a dead spiritual life in our outer caskets of gold to impress others, the beauty of the exterior does not change the absence of a spiritual life on the inside of us.
I think this is what Jesus is trying to get at in today’s Gospel: (Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48). Jesus kept teaching people about the world-changing event that was imminent, his own death and resurrection.
Jesus welcomed the weak, the unimportant, the rejected, the unclean, the sinners, the outsiders, the contemptible, and the condemned. The Twelve Apostles mistakenly thought they were somehow especially righteous. But they were wrong.
When they mention that they stopped someone casting out devils using Jesus’ name, Jesus asks, “Are they doing good in his name?” As Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Jesus uses graphic hyperbole to dramatize how it would be better for us to lose parts of our own body than to wind up in Gehenna or hell, a burning pit forever separated from God. Jesus is telling us that it is better to hobble into heaven than to stride un-scarred into hell.
If a “Doctor of the Soul” took a good look at YOUR inner life today, how would he or she describe it?
PRAYER IS A VACCINE WHICH PROTECTS US FROM VIRUSES LIKE SORROW, GLOOM, SIN AND HOPELESSNESS.
