Where are you searching for happiness? – (Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48)
There are some Gospel passages and when you read them you want to run away and look for a more – user-friendly passage. This Sunday’s passage is one of these. What is Jesus on-about, cutting off hands and feet and plucking out one’s eyes? What is all this about hell, “where their worm does not die nor their fire go out”.
We must remember that when Jesus speaks to us it is always to encourage us to a true way of living and a way of finding true happiness. So even this passage has hope in it, some secret of happiness.
What has the eye, the hand and the leg all in common? They can all take us away from ourselves. Jesus is warning us that if the source of our happiness is always outsides of ourselves then we will be living in a hell formed by ourselves. If you think that your happiness would be secure if you lived somewhere else (your leg could carry you there), or if you had more money or possessions (which your hands could hold) then you would be happy, or if you looked like him or her (as you see them with your eye), then you would be happy; these “worms” of insecurity and wishing everything was different would eat you up and place you in a living hell.
Jesus is telling us that he wants to free us from such a hell and give us true hope and freedom. He says that we are not to be looking outside of ourselves to other places, things or other people for happiness. We must find our happiness within our own souls, souls filled with his presence. He offers himself to us in the peace of our souls as the gift of true peace. He said to his disciples on Holy Thursday, “peace I give my, my peace I leave you, not as the world gives do I give it to you” This is the same offer in this Sunday’s Gospel.
It is a very challenging Gospel, but one that offers us hope and peace. Jesus is the answer to all your longings. As our recent popes have all reminded us, the love and truth that we are all searching for has a face, it is Jesus. To search for it anywhere else is to be disappointed. In an age that tells us happiness is to be found in the pages of magazines, unreality shows etc. the Gospel tells us what indeed who we are truly searching for is to be found in a personal relationship with Jesus.
Fr. John Harris O.P.