In our reading from his First Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul notes that "the power of sin is the law" (1 Cor 15:56). In Paul's view, the law can't rescue you from your sins. The law can only reveal your sinfulness to you. It is through Jesus Christ that you are already victorious over sin. Rather than causing you to sin more, Christ's victory enables you to labor on behalf of God's kingdom, which labor consists of steadfastly loving God by loving your neighbor as you love yourself.
Our reading from the Book of Sirach notes something that is also set forth in the New Testament, both in Jesus's own teaching in today's Gospel reading, as well as in the Letter of James and in Paul's writings, namely that what how you speak and act reveals who you really are. Your words and actions lift the veil of subjectivity from your heart and "reveal" you to the world.
Now, this may not be absolutely true in every case for a number of reasons but what you say and do certainly makes an impression on others, shaping and forming their image of you. It has been noted that we inevitably have several "selves." There is who you perceive yourself to be, there is who those closest to you perceive you to be, and who you are to someone who doesn't know you well. Finally, there is who God knows you to be, which is your very best self- the person God created, redeemed, and is now sanctifying you to be. By your words and actions, hopefully, you are not at work in your relationships trying to prove God wrong!
In our first reading, Sirach points out something quite unpleasant. But it is no less true for being unpleasant: every day is judgment day. This what he means when he says that just as pottery can only be made fit for use by being baked in a kiln, so are you made fit for the Kingdom by passing through tribulation. The tribulation to which he refers, it seems to me, is that of everyday life. How often do your good intentions not survive contact with the outside world?! How often, for example, do you lose your patience at the slightest inconvenience concerning the most trivial matter? On my part, I must confess, this happens more frequently than I care to admit. To paraphrase a deep thought by Jack Handy: In a former life I must've been a great king because I like people to do what I say.
This brings us to our Gospel reading for this Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. It seems to me that this Gospel reading, taken from the sixth chapter of St Luke's Gospel, is very fitting for the last Sunday prior to the start of Lent. In the first section, Jesus teaches about discipleship, about what it means to follow him.
Jesus begins by saying that a disciple who attempts to lead other disciples before she is fully formed is like a blind person trying to lead another blind person along a treacherous path, one with which she is not familiar, one that features a pit. Inevitably, the two will fall into the pit. Hence, they won't reach their desired destination, or their arrival will be delayed. To lead others, one must first be fully formed, which means becoming like Christ, our Teacher and Master.
Jesus's short teaching about the blind leading the blind has bearing on the seemingly never-ending sexual abuse crisis with which the church continues to grapple. Too many "leaders" in the church have either forsaken being Jesus's disciples or never have put themselves under his tutelage. This has nothing to do with academic formation. In fact, too much emphasis has been placed at times on academic achievement and too little placed on pastoral experience, which constitutes the daily tribulation of those who commit themselves full-time to ministry. One cannot be spiritually mature and emotionally immature. Emotional maturity is the foundation upon which spiritual maturity is built. This is just a quasi-clinical way of stating that you can't be a Christian leader, one who seeks to serve and not to be served, and not submit yourself to Jesus's teaching.
According to Jesus, the qualities by which I can judge whether or not I am his disciple are humility and mercy. Rather than judging the relatively minor faults of others, I need to attend daily to my own heart. After all, my heart and Jesus's Sacred Heart, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Chaste Heart of St Joseph, are the only hearts to which I have interior access. Jesus's Sacred Heart provides me with the criteria to judge my own heart, thus enabling me to remove the beam from my eye. At the end of the day, it is not my job to remove the splinter from my brother's eye.
In a book on church architecture, Theology in Stone, noting the importance of environment to Christian discipleship, Richard Kieckhefer notes something very important, something that is transferable to the context laid out by today's scriptural readings: "One does not first learn to feel reverent inwardly and then act reverently with genuflection or other gestures...reverence is an orientation of both disposition and behavior, both learned simultaneously." In other words, there should be no incongruity between my inward disposition and my outward behavior. I need to develop both at the same time.
In reality, it is very often the case that my speaking and acting shape and form my heart rather than the other way around. This is borne out by how St Mark, in his Gospel, gives words to Jesus's call to conversion: μετανοεῖτε καὶ πιστεύετε ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ. Translated literally, Jesus's call to conversion, according to Mark, goes something like this: "Be you repenting and be you believing in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15). Note two things: Jesus's message is delivered in the continuously active sense, pointing to the fact that conversion is an on-going, life-long, process and repenting (i.e., changing your ways) comes before believing.
Currently, I am slowly reading through the Rule of St Benedict. Benedict, who is called the father of Western Christian monasticism, places great emphasis on the consistency between one's inward disposition and one's behavior. In fact, his Rule can rightly be said to be manual about achieving this kind of consistency. This is why it is useful for anyone who is serious about following Jesus.
In her commentary on the Rule of St Benedict, A Life-Giving Way, in a section on the Rule's "Prologue," Esther de Waal points out that Benedict's focus is on the struggle between good evil, which "is not to be found in the outside world, but within the individual soul." De Waal emphatically asserts that Benedict "has no time" for the theoretical, for affirming Christ with one's lips and giving intellectual assent to his teaching while making no attempt to daily put his teaching into practice. How we use our days, the time God mercifully gives us, she notes, is for Benedict "no less than a matter of life or death."
And so, as we approach the sanctifying season of conversion known as Lent, let's each of us examine our own heart. Let's each of us resolve to mend our ways and follow Christ, always bearing in mind that every day is judgment day, even as we daily experience God's patience and mercy, which we should actively extend to others. Rather than waiting for your inward resolve to precede your words and actions, keep in mind the words of your Teacher, Jesus:
A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45)
No comments:
Post a Comment