Becoming Fully Trained and Like Our Teacher, 23rd Friday (I), September 10, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
September 10, 2021
1 Tim 1:1-2.12-14, Ps 16, Lk 6:39-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Plain are all about Christian morality, about Jesus’ teaching us not only on Christian conduct but on the principles, the starting points, of Christian morality, which is God’s own life in us. Yesterday he spoke to us about the depth to which the love of God in us is supposed to take us: like him, to the point of loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, doing good to those who do evil to us, so that we might become truly like our Father who lets his sun and rain fall on the good and the bad. Today Jesus focuses on the gift of his mercy, received with humility, so that he may train us to become like him, see things aright, and then act with mercy and love to guide others toward God.
• Jesus begins today by addressing our tendency to criticize others as a deflection of not looking in the spiritual mirror of conscience. We see others’ faults much more clearly, sometimes, than we see our own. He wants us to take out the forest of redwoods from our own eyes so that we can see clearly and afterward help our neighbor to address their own problems. In all of this, he is trying to help us see things as he does, to see things as they really are. That’s why there’s a sentence that seems out of place. After talking about the blind leading the blind and before speaking about planks and specks, he says, “No disciple is superior to the teacher; but when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.” Jesus wants us to be fully trained so that we might become like him. To do that, we need to see everything as he does. We need to view everything with the eyes of faith, with the eyes of merciful love. And for that, we need to remove all of the obstacles that impair our vision.
• This is something St. Paul does very candidly in today’s first reading. Writing to his spiritual son, St. Timothy, the doctor of the gentiles expressed his gratitude to the Lord for strengthening him and considering him trustworthy for the ministry despite, he says, “once being a blasphemer and a persecutor and an arrogant man.” Blasphemer? He was a devout Pharisee who would never have cursed God. What does he mean? He wasn’t glorifying God because, like his fellow Pharisees, he was focused too much on his own deeds, his works of the law, rather than living by faith in the Lord who loved him and gave his life for him. He acted out of ignorance in his “unbelief,” he says. He was blinded by his lack of faith in Jesus, and that led him to be a persecutor and an arrogant man, refusing to accept what God was proclaiming through the members of the early Church who had been saved by Christ. God helped him on the road to Damascus. He had him see how blind he was and, after three days of not being able to see anything, scales fell from his eyes when he was baptized. That’s why he was able to glorify God by saying, “The grace of our Lord has been abundant, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” Paul wants us to have the same experience of seeing everything by God’s light. He wishes us “grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” When we receipt that gift to see things as they are, then we become capable of leading others to Christ. We’re no longer blind guides leading other blind people into pits, including eternal ones; rather, we’re capable of guiding them by the light of faith in faith to the celestial Jerusalem.
• Every Mass is an opportunity for us to become like our Master, who comes here to teach, to feed, and to lead. At the beginning of Mass, he helps us to notice our blind spots and we beg his mercy to remove them. We recalibrate our vision to focus on him in the Holy Eucharist so that we may see more clearly and notice him in the midst of our day and in others. And then, because we’re focused on him, we’re able to lead others, as fully trained disciples, like St. Paul, to the Christ we see. We thank him for considering us trustworthy to appoint us to the Christian apostolate, for having treated us mercifully in our ignorance, and for having enriched us with abundant mercy, faith and love. As we prayed in the Psalm,  the Lord is our inheritance, and it’s here that he makes us his heirs so that we may be like our Teacher as children of the Father!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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