8^th Sunday in O.T.; March 3, 2019

Sir 27:4-7   Ps 92   1 Cor 15:54-58   Lk 6:39-45

Deacon Jim McFadden

 

There are different levels of spiritual development. Though we hope that we are all moving in the same direction as we strive to realize our destiny, we are at different stages of the journey. If our eyes have not been opened, if we haven’t been ‘woke’ in today’s parlance, we must find someone who’s eyes are opened wide. If we apprentice ourselves to someone blind or whose vision is just as blurred as ours , then we may have attached our self to a soul buddy. But we also may have a companion who is bumbling in the same darkness as us and we both will probably meet the same catastrophe. It’s the veritable ‘blind leading the blind’ scenario. When it comes down to it, like tends to attract like: that’s why the blind, tone-deaf tend to huddle with those who are also blind and tone deaf because it gives them comfort and reassures them that they right.

In the Buddhist practice of the Eight-Fold Path which is a way to attain enlightenment, there is this notion of right association. Disciples of Buddha begin their training by apprenticing themselves to someone who is above them and is farther along the spiritual journey. It’s like training a young, wild elephant: you tie its front and back leg to the corresponding leg of a calm older elephant. The former goes where the latter goes and soon the younger becomes like the older. In sum, the goal of the training is to become like the teacher.

The key question is who is our teacher? Do we get our instruction from shock radio and cable news, or are we formed from another source? In the Gospel of this past Tuesday (Mark 7:30-37) Jesus presents a child as the teacher-model for his disciples.   Jesus had just laid out for his disciples that the culmination of salvation history is going to occur when he enters Jerusalem, where he will be falsely condemned, rejected, tortured, and killed. Totally clueless to this, his disciples argue instead who is the greatest.   For Jesus, the path to greatness, to fulfillment lies on the road to Calvary, to self-forgetting love. For his disciples—and most people of all ages—it lies along the road to ego inflation. It’s the perennial tension between the Spirit and the Flesh.

What’s the antidote? Jesus proposes a child as a living icon for his ambitious disciples. First, we notice how Jesus identifies with the child, sitting down at his level and placing his arms around him. Jesus seems to be saying that he himself is a child. How so? Children don’t’ know how to lie yet. They haven’t learned how to say one thing and act another. What you see is what you get. They act in accordance with their deepest nature.

The choice of a child as a model for discipleship gets close to the heart of Jesus’ life and message: life is about self-emptying love and not the acquisition of the goods of the world, especially prestige.

So, who is going to be our teacher? A criterion for choosing a teacher is what do we see in the person that we want to become? In a passage from this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus will tell his disciples the type of person they will become if they hear, understand, and put his words into action. In so doing, today’s disciple will be tomorrow’s teacher.

Listen: “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove the splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye” (Lk 6:41-42).

If we are bound by the shackles of ego-inflation, we will fret, expound on the slightest fault of our neighbor while we are oblivious to our own staggering imperfections. Let’s be honest: we’re not paragons of objectivity, passing neutral judgments on what we see. Rather, it’s like the recent movie, Blindspotting which addresses the underlying syndrome of racial prejudice: our minds have biases, tapes, and narratives that we don’t even know that are there, but they play into everything that we do. If we think we don’t have these tapes, then we are willfully ignorant. Without this humble self-knowledge, we tend to paint pictures of ourselves and our resident tribe that are praiseworthy and even innocent. Then we view the world from the interpretive lens of this narrative as if we are not part of it. We live in distain for others who are different than us rather than have compassion for them.

There is a story told about Gandhi that illustrates this point. A woman brought her granddaughter to Gandhi and commanded, “My granddaughter eats too much sugar. Tell her to stop.

Gandhi said, “Bring her back next week.”

The grandmother and granddaughter returned next week. But Gandhi again put them off, saying the same thing, “Bring her back to me next week.” This happened three times.

Finally, Gandhi said to the granddaughter, “You should not eat so much sugar. It is not good for you.”

The grandmother was not impressed: We waited four weeks for this simple remark?”

“Ah!” Gandhi sighed. “It took me that long to stop eating too much sugar myself.”

The only way to help our neighbor is to tell the story of our own struggle between the Spirit that strives to embrace self-emptying love or the Flesh that’s into ego-inflation.

It really comes down to who our teacher is. Spiritual development entails hearing our teacher, understanding what he is teaching us, then having the courage to act on it. As disciples of Jesus, if we do all of that, what will we become? We will become like Jesus: we will become Christified, which means we will be become flood proof. Raging waters symbolize the vicissitudes of life and the dark, sinister forces that seek to destroy human life. If we embrace Jesus as our teacher, then he offers us a solid foundation to resist these attacks. This is not pie-in-the-sky, heavenly promises, but nitty-gritty, down-to-earth practical wisdom on how not to be engulfed by the false promises of the Prince of Darkness, but rather to become fully human in an imperfect world. Jesus the teacher wants disciples who can act, survive, and flourish in a dangerous world.

So, who is your teacher? Amen.