Ordering and Living Our Priorities!

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Sir 5:1-8; Mk 9: 41-50

Today’s Gospel is a continuation of yesterday, wherein we found Jesus affirming the need to support good missions and missionaries who function in his name. 

Today’s Gospel enlightens us with the perspective of God. While even the smallest act of kindness toward a disciple of Jesus is remembered, causing the fall of his disciple is heavily condemned. 

The theme is explained in three ways. 

1.Helping the disciple of Jesus procures God’s blessing. However, a curse falls upon those who become a stumbling block for the disciples of Jesus. 

2. Regarding the members of the body becoming the obstacles for exercising our discipleship, though Jesus does not allude to self-mutilation literally (because for Jesus, the heart is the epicenter of morality, not body parts), his words prize holiness above the temptations to sin. 

3. For Jesus, what makes us his disciples is more important, and it can never be compromised. Through the example of salt, Jesus shows that vocational integrity is the saltiness of Christians that can never be lost by them whatsoever. Preserving what makes us the missionaries of Christ reveals our commitment to discipleship. 

Let us pray that we may identify the priorities of discipleship and commit ourselves to live them faithfully. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar