The center holds

 ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. (Mark 9:42-43)

At first blush, there is no good reason Jesus’ words should move spiritual consolation in anyone’s heart, let alone mine. A cold wave of nausea churns at the hollow of my gut as I imagine his image. Surely, it is intended for me.

I have caused little and not-so-little ones to stumble, my words, attitudes and actions falling far short of faithfulness any number of times. I doubt I’ll ever stop carrying the moment I extended my hand to a parishioner as the congregation passed the peace during worship.  ‘I’m ashamed to know you,’ he said, refusing my hand. ‘No kind of leadership at all.’

He spoke for himself, but I’ve no doubt others share his judgment, and some for better reasons than he had. I pray they will find ways to release those judgments, not for my sake but for their own peace and spiritual health.

Ironically, or not, my consolation is found exactly in the words that would condemn me. Re-reading Jesus’ words, tears spring to my eyes as a wave of love rises and swamps my soul, filling me with love for everything he is. For Jesus speaks in great love, calling me from all peripheral concerns to the center of life, to its purpose and goal—eternal life.

This is what most matters, entering, knowing and living intimately with God whose love shines in the face of Jesus. Even his dire warnings speak his great love as he calls us to throw away everything and anything that would keep us from the fulfillment of our existence, which is to live, heart-to-heart, now and forever, with the Love who is the Source of all life.

‘Everything and anything’ include the judgments of others and those we exact on ourselves for the sins and failures that haunt us. There is one cure. All of them evaporate like morning mist in the warm rays of the Love who keeps calling us to life’s true center, the love of the One who showers mercy on his failing friends and forgives even his persecutors.

There is no end to the number of times we need to remind ourselves of this, lest something other than God’s love rules at the center of our hearts. Perhaps we need to be like my old friend, Bob. I held his hand and prayed with him in his final weeks. ‘Tell me that verse again,’ he’d ask on every visit. ‘You know the one. I need to remember.’

‘Yea, Bob, I remember,’ I’d say. ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.’

Bob would exhale, long and deep, and lie back in his bed feeling something that looked a lot like peace. And I fell silent. There was nothing more needing to be said. We rested in life’s true center. Nothing else mattered.

David L Miller