Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Have you noticed how often Jesus uses extreme contrasts to teach us about our wickedness?  There’s the splinter in someone else’s eye contrasted to the beam in our own; we strain out a gnat while swallowing a camel; we are like a rich man trying to go through the eye of a needle; or like the very rich man ignoring the very poor beggar, Lazarus, at his doorstep;  we are like those who give from their surplus versus the widow who gives all she has; we are like the nine ungrateful lepers versus the one who returns to express his gratitude; we are like an unforgiving servant who owed an enormous debt contrasted with one who owed him a small amount.   

Jesus also uses extreme contrasts to teach us about the kingdom of God: a mustard seed becoming the largest of bushes; Jesus feeding four or five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; saving one lost sheep out of 99; finding a lost coin out of ten; forgiving seventy times seven times; receiving a day’s pay for working one hour; leaving everything and receiving a hundred fold; laboring at a fruitless night of fishing and receiving a miraculous catch of fish the next morning.

The extremes of our wickedness are brought face to face in the Gospels with the extremes of God’s mercy and love. The choice is ours: will we deny there’s a log in our own eye and remain blind, or will we bear good fruit from a tree rooted in the store of goodness that comes from the heart of God?   

 A monk was slowly walking along a road when he heard the sound of a trotting horse. He turned around to see a man on horseback coming in his direction. When the man arrives close by, the monk asks, “Where are you going?”. To which the man replies, “I don’t know, ask the horse” and rides away. How many people today can answer that question: “Where are you going? What is the purpose of your life?”  How many are blind leading the blind? 

Jesus also said, “… an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”  Another monk decided to meditate alone, away from everybody. He took a boat to the middle of a lake, let it drift and closed his eyes to begin meditating. After some time had passed, he suddenly felt the hard bump of another boat colliding with his own. With his eyes still closed, he felt anger rising in his heart. He was ready to scream at the person who dared disturb his meditation.  But when he opened his eyes, he saw it was an empty boat that had floated to the middle of the lake where he was meditating. 

At that moment, he understood that the anger was within him; it merely needed the bump of an empty boat to provoke it out of him.  From then on, whenever he came across someone who irritated him or provoked him to anger, he reminded himself, “The anger is not outside me, it is within me.”

And that is what Jesus is teaching us about anger, as it is written in the book of Proverbs 16:32: “Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city.”

Let us take to heart what St. Paul teaches us is his letter to the Corinthians today: “Be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor 15:58).