A Moment To Pause: Saturday February 7th 2026 #podcast #reflection #gospel

Good morning and thank you for joining our Oblate short time to pause, reflect and pray together on Saturday February 7th 2026. Thanks to Caroline Shevelan for today's reflection. Today’s Gospel is another challenging one. It is a passage that has been used and misused over the generations to control, to frighten, to justify cruel judgement and punishment. A brief google search of homilies on this passage describe it variously as the hard truth of the Gospel, the war on sin and other alarming and doom laden titles which I had thought consigned to history. How then do I respond to these sentences that mostly begin with ‘it would be better if’ Honestly I find them incongruent. The passage does not fit my picture of Jesus, or of a loving God the Father. Neither do they fit a picture of a relational God that has been built this week. Yet here it is a part of our lectionary so it must be important. The rhythm of the week so far has been Jesus light of the word proclaimed. The commandment to love as we are loved, a concrete example of what that means in relation to others, and an example of how we might misuse commandment and tradition. So is sin a failure to love then? Maybe one thing Jesus is saying here is that we do serious damage to ourselves and to others when we fail to love. In this context the passage makes more sense for me. How much does it deeply hurt us when someone fails to see our need? Or walks by deliberately? The imagery is extreme, but so is the pain of betrayal, loss, of being ignored or deliberately mistreated. Thank you for joining us this morning!