Fully Trained to Be Like Jesus Our Teacher, Eighth Sunday (C), March 2, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
March 2, 2025
Sir 24:4-7, Ps 92, 1 Cor 15:54–58, Lk 6:39-47

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• For the third straight week, we have a chance to listen to Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain and the readings that support it, something we only have a chance to do when Lent basically begins very late in Year C. This has happened only three times in my 26 years as a priest. So let’s make the most of this opportunity.
• Two weeks ago Jesus gave us St. Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, showing us that the path of happiness in this world and the next is not through wealth, food and drink, parties, popularity and praise, but, as he shows us, through treasuring the kingdom, having our hearts burst with compassion, through hungering and thirsting for holiness and through courageously and faithfully remaining true to him even if we have to suffer for it. Last week we heard him summon us more deeply toward his own way of living, which involves loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, doing good to those who persecute us, turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile out of love even for someone who doesn’t love us. Today Jesus continues describing for us the distinctiveness of the Christian life, speaking to us today just as much as he spoke to his listeners on the plain. And his words are as relevant now as they ever were, because they touch on what plagues so many people today.
• Jesus gives us three central teachings in today’s Gospel, each of which he makes by means of a simple unforgettable image: the first is about blind guides; the second about the speck of dust versus a plank of wood; the third is about trees bearing fruit. All three go together. We’ll discuss each one in turn in the hope that we might see both their relevance and their connections.
• Jesus first asks, “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.” We need a guide when we don’t know how to get to where we’d like to end up, and when we don’t understand the meaning of things we encounter along the way. A good guide knows how to get to the destination and knows how to explain what we see along the journey. Even young people today in the age of driving with GPS have been in circumstances where they’ve asked someone for directions, received them and then followed them only to end up lost. It’s one of the most frustrating experiences in life, when someone who doesn’t know how to guide us to a particular location isn’t humble enough to admit it and therefore gets us even more lost. There are others who sort of know how to get to the destination, but who don’t know how to give clear indications about the right places to turn or even the time-saving shortcuts to take.
• It’s similar in the spiritual life. To be a guide, we have to know the destination and we have to know how to get there. Ultimately, there is only one guide: Jesus, who is the Way to Eternal Life with the Father. He pointed the way, he opened the gates of heaven, he created the Church as the only barque, the only boat, that he’s steering toward that distant shore. Jesus is the clear-sighted expert guide. The Church is his pilgrimage company, to help him guide us on our pilgrim way. Jesus says, “A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.” The Pope, the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, catechists, Catholic school teachers, theologians, parents, grandparents and godparents, when they remain faithful to what they have heard and received from the Master, Jesus, are all called to be true guides to heaven, keeping us on the right track during the pilgrimage each of us is making to the next life.
• The funny thing is, so few people today, even many Catholics, look to Jesus as their rea;u day-to-day Guide. Instead, they find their direction from worldly gurus like Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Phil, politicians, rappers and celebrities whom they make false prophets, listening to them and most often hearing that the meaning of life is something other than what Jesus told us it was. If they’re not leading us to Jesus, they are blind guides, proclaiming the woes Jesus described two weeks ago as the goals of life, teaching us how to know and defeat our enemies rather than love them, often serving the gods of sex, money, power, their own egos, but not serving God and guiding us on the path to Him and to the eternal life he died to give us. Today we first have to ask ourselves: who are the guides we really follow? To whom do we look for direction day by day? Do we follow Christ, even and especially when it is hard, even when he’s leading us through the dark to some distant place, even when we don’t understand why he is permitting something to happen to us or teaching us something we don’t yet understand? He’s the only guide who has gotten to the destination we want to end up; he has established his Church and sent out his disciples and apostles to be like him, echoing his words and pointing to him. Do we follow them faithfully as he calls us to?
• The second part of today’s Gospel concerns not the guide’s vision illumined by a divine perspective, but our vision. Jesus says to us, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” We live in a very critical age. Everybody criticizes everybody else and notices everybody else’s flaws, but we seldom recognize our own. As an overreaction to this, some people, presuming to try to speak for Jesus, say: “Don’t criticize anyone else. Don’t be judgmental of anybody else or their actions. We’re no better else. Just live and let live.” Jesus, however, does not say “Don’t criticize anyone else for doing wrong.” That would be inconsistent with loving someone else. If someone were a terrible alcoholic and could no longer control his drinking, we wouldn’t love that person or be his friend if we didn’t try to tell him to do something about his drinking. Jesus, however, says that before we do that, we need to take out the plank out of our own eye before we help our sibling or friend take out the speck in his. He who created us knows us so very well. He sees that the reason why we start criticizing others, the reason why we start noticing all of their flaws, is normally because we don’t have the guts to look in the mirror to see our own. The reason we criticize others is often so that we can make ourselves look good in comparison with their flaws. In the seminary, when we were tempted to go to others to complain about something they were doing or a decision they had made, we were encouraged first to examine whether there was something wrong inside of us such that we were deflecting our attention onto others’ foibles. More often than not, our critical attitude derives from the fact that we are not at peace within ourselves. This is the behavior Jesus calls us to. He says first examine yourself, straighten out your problems with me, with yourself and with others, and then go constructively criticize others, because then you’ll see clearly. He wants us to help them take the speck out of their eye, but only after we can see clearly, see with his eyes, his charity, his mercy, even pure vision. If we’re ever going to presume to guide anyone toward better behavior, we first have to make sure our eyes are free of any planks that might keep us from seeing and following Christ.
• In the third and last part of today’s Sermon on the Plain, Jesus uses the image of bearing fruit. “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; or each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” Jesus speaks very commonsensically here. To see who a person is, we observe how he acts. A person can say that she has great faith, but we see if she does by observing her deeds of love. Jesus said in the Gospel of John, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” We have to be with Jesus to bear good fruit and apart from him we can bear any good fruit. We often see the fruit when the tree is shaken, as Sirach teaches us in the first reading. “When a sieve is shaken, the refuse appears; so do a person’s faults when he speaks.” The tree is shaken when a person speaks, when the person puts the thoughts of his heart and mind into action in either word or deed. The lesson for us today, Jesus’ lesson, is to focus on the tree not on the fruit! We’re called, like we prayed in the Psalm, to “flourish like the palm tree, … planted in the house of the Lord, [who] bear fruit even in old age, vigorous and sturdy.” Sometimes when our tree is fine, we seem to produce little fruit, or make mistakes, or can’t seem to do anything well. But one day our tree will start to produce in a similar way to a mother I know who tried to have children for years. She waited five long years and never thought she’d conceive. But then, after much prayer, she conceived her first child and now she has five children. Other times, in contrast, we seem to be bearing good fruit — and everybody thinks good of us — despite the fact that we know we really need to correct our relationship with God by means of the sacrament of Confession and living our Christian life more fully. When our tree is shaken by some stressful circumstance, that’s when our lack of integration, even our hidden vices, our lack of Christian faith, hope and love, can come to the surface. That’s why God sometimes permits our tree to be shaken.
• All three of today’s Biblical images go together. Jesus calls all of us first to look at Him, and the Church he founded, as our guide so that we can know that we’re on the way to Him, then to look within and remove any planks in our sight that can prevent us from seeing him. He calls us always to be attached to him, who is the Vine, and then attached to him, having removed sin from our eyes, he calls us to be guides for others, pointing to Him, and bearing fruit in acts of love, helping them by our patient and loving example to remove the specks from their eyes so that they can see Jesus.
• Today’s readings, therefore, are an excellent preparation for Lent, which begins in three days. Lent is a spiritual boot camp in which we strive, with God’s help, to become more and more like Christ. “No disciple is superior to the teacher,” Jesus tells us today, “but when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.” Lent provides the training for us to become like Christ. Just as he went to the desert for 40 days to pray, so we make the commitment to improve the quality and — for most of us — quantity of our prayer time. Just as Jesus fasted so much that the devil’s first temptation to him was to try to have him transform stones into bread, so we take on the self-discipline of fasting, which helps us to say “yes” to God and “no” to sin by training us to say “no” to our appetite for food and drink. Just as Jesus generously gave everything down to the last drop of his blood, so in Lent we seek to imitate his merciful love, giving of ourselves, our time, our gifts and our material resources, to those who are in need. The main purpose of Lent is to become like the praying, fasting, almsgiving Jesus and Jesus seeks to give us that training so that we can become like him, our teacher, and seeing God, others and ourselves clearly, become true guides for others to him. Lent is about recognizing our blind spots, the sins that cloud our vision, and striving by God’s mercy to eliminate those planks and even specks. If our eyes occluded, we can’t effectively be his instruments, his guides, to help others remove the sins from their life. We’d be like eye surgeons with macular degeneration trying to do delicate corneal surgery. Lent is the time in which we go to Jesus the Divine Physician to be cured of our sins so that with charity and humility we can help others rid sin from their lives, too. And, like the third image in today’s Gospel, Lent is not just about bearing fruit but about becoming a good tree. It’s not about random acts of kindness but about becoming truly charitable. In Lent, Jesus wants to graft us onto him as branches to the vine, not just partially but fully. He wants us to remain in him in prayer. He wants us to remain in him in the way we eat and drink and work and recreate. He wants us to remain in him in how we relate to others, loving them in the truth of his divine love. This is the way to bear abundant fruit that will last.
• This transformation — from blind guide full of planks to good guide, from barren or stingy tree to abundantly fruitful — is meant to take place not just in Lent but in every Mass, when we listen to the Divine Master as he teaches us in the Liturgy of the Word, when we confess the planks in our eyes and ask him to remove them, when we recalibrate our vision and behold the Lamb of God and receive His flesh and blood from that Vine so that we, attached to him, might jointly love God and others with all we’ve got and be formed to lead them, as fully trained disciples, to the Christ we behold. Mass is the time, as we prepare to meet and receive the Risen Lord Jesus in Holy Communion, when we are able, with St. Paul in today’s second reading, to rejoice in Christ’s victory and what it means for us, exaliming, “O death, where is your victory? O death where is your sting?” It’s what helps us to enter anew into Jesus’ triumph and be strengthened by him on the inside to, as the apostle says, “be first, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord [our] labor is not in vain.” It’s where we become capable, united with him, of guiding others to Him who is the way to happiness, holiness and heaven.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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