8th. Sunday of Year (C)
(Sirach
27:4-7; 1st. Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45)
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Dear
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, those words of Jesus are once again taken from
His Sermon on the Plain as presented by St. Luke. I would like to think that you will remember
that last Sunday we considered an earlier section of the same Sermon on the
Plain urging us to total commitment to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our
lives, to the extent that we cannot at any point say ‘Thus far and no further’.
Today’s
section is, however, less directly spiritual;
it begins with the words Jesus told them a parable, but it is not a
parable such we normally hear from Jesus, for there is no story, and the adages
it contains are more or less of traditional human wisdom:
Can a blind person guide a
blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?
Why do you notice the splinter
in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?
A good tree does not bear
rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.
People do not pick figs from
thornbushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles.
From the fulness of the heart
the mouth speaks: a good person produces good, an evil person produces evil.
The
general thrust of those adages is to provoke a right answer to the question
‘where is helpful guidance for right-living to be found?’ From someone who is blind? From one whose sight is more impaired than
your own? From one whose way of life is the
opposite of what you seek: fruit that is, from what is … to use the correct
word … rotten? Something
admirable, desirable, from what is harmful and unproductive?
Where, indeed, can we find help to open up our heart and life to total love for and obedience to the Holy Spirit, to Whom, as we learned last week, no one can faithfully think of saying, ‘Thus far and no further!’
Mixed up among those adages in today’s Gospel reading are words which probably refer to Jesus Himself, words thus opening the way for Jesus’ very own wisdom and guidance:
No disciple is superior to the teacher; when
fully trained, every disciple will
be like his teacher.
And that personal wisdom and teaching of Jesus does indeed follow on immediately after today’s Gospel reading (Luke 6:46–47):
Why do you call me, ‘Lord,
Lord,’ but not do what I command? I
will show you what someone is like who comes to Me, listens to My words, and
acts on them;
And
Jesus then goes on to tell them a real parable about the wise man who built on
rock and the foolish man who built on sand.
And so, dear People of God, this is our situation today: we had, last Sunday, Our Lord’s personal teaching taken from St. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain immediately before today’s Gospel; and immediately after today’s reading, there is more of Jesus’ own personal guidance from that same Sermon on the Plain; but what we have for our Gospel reading today is just those adages.
However, remember those very adages are mentioned by Jesus Himself and are now contained in holy Scripture, and thereby they are sanctified over and above their own native, human, worth. Let us examine that fact somewhat.
Last Sunday Jesus urged us to open ourselves up to the Holy Spirit’s guidance in our lives. How? For ordinary people, such as that crowd of Israelites and Palestinians who had walked many, many, miles to hear Jesus-- or quite possibly just to see one so famous as He was -- Jesus begins by calling to their minds the wisdom that was already available to them: traditional wise sayings, from locally recognized and admired, revered, personalities; or from passing Scribes, or even from well-known rabbis.
Transferring things to our days, dear People of God, Jesus seems to be suggesting that whoever is – like that crowd of Israelites and Palestinians in our Gospel -- seeking soul-satisfying help, help offering their personal awareness a deeper sense of understanding and peace of soul; all those who have some understanding and sympathy with these words of the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell found after his death on his desk:
The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain – a curious wild pain – a searching for something transfigured and infinite;
for all people wanting to salve an indefinable need and vague longing, and who are not yet directly in Jesus’ orbit, so to speak, there is indeed something readily available to you, some salutary help that can sustain you for the moment, and prepare you to finally be able to recognize, appreciate, and embrace the saving, the life-giving, words of Jesus Himself.
For Jesus once said:
Whoever
chooses to do His (God
the Father’s) will, shall know whether My teaching is from God or whether I
speak on My own; (John 7:17)
and
I am saying today, that those words of Jesus can be well understood as truly
meaningful for all who are painfully aware of the emptiness and frailty or
their own life and life-style, of the evil seeping and soaking everywhere in
the society and world around them; for all who are seeking and grasping
for what is truly good, for the betterment of the lives they are
wanting to live to the full; and for their own greater awareness of, and
response to, whatever is beautiful and true; those words of Jesus are essential
and most meaningful:
Whoever chooses to do His (God
the Father’s) will, shall know whether My teaching is from God or whether I
speak on My own;
To all who are thus wanting to turn from lies to truth, from what merely appears and pretends to be, and turning to whatever is real, sincere, and available to them from human sources (exemplified by the adages cited by Jesus); to all those able to learn from the glory of God touchable in the beauties of earth about them and shining in the splendours of the heavens above them; to all those, help will be given from God to sift what is profitable for them from all the human treasures of great literature, transcendent music, inspiring art, and whatever results from and truly expresses the wonderful potency and glorious responsibility of native humanity still remaining in our world today.
That help will be given them, I say, in order to enable them to progress further to Jesus Himself Whose life, love, and legacy, alone are salvific, life-giving, and purifying from all sin; the transcendent fulfilment of whatever is salutary for men and women of good will in our world today. Transcendent indeed, because Jesus is the very Son of God; yet our fulfilment too, because He is sublimely Perfect in His humanity:
CHRIST the KING, PERFECT GOD and PERFECT MAN,
sent by Him Who is the one, true, God; Father and lover of all that he has made; the God of fleeting creation and eternal salvation.
