8th Sunday Ordinary Time - February 27, 2022

Living in sync – a disciple’s challenge
One of the modern-day phenomena of having access to social media is the fact many people assume the role of self-proclaimed gurus. Imagine the scenario of would-be teachers or leaders who are expert at putting on a mask and offering advice to others regarding moral improvement. But this reality of incompetent teachers existed in the ancient world too. In fact, audiences constantly wonder about the teacher. And the teacher always strives to put on the best front!

      Jesus, however, calls these teachers “hypocrites!” In classical and Hellenistic Greek this word meant “interpreter,” “expounder,” “orator ” even “stage actor.” In this latter case, the Greek word took on the added meaning of “deceiver” and “pretender.” In theater, this is an award-winning skill. In reality—even in Mediterranean culture—this skill and strategy makes life difficult. Whom can one trust?

It is in this context that Jesus warns about ‘blind guides’. To lead a blind person, one must be sighted; to teach, one must be knowledgeable; otherwise, the blind person and the student will be lost. The sight and the knowledge specified here are the insights that come through Faith and the Holy Spirit, and the knowledge that comes from a Faith-filled relationship with the Lord. The point of this image of the blind leading the blind is that we must be careful when choosing whom to follow, lest we stumble into a pit alongside our blind guide. A corollary is that we have no business trying to guide others unless we ourselves can see clearly. There are people who trust us to lead them to safety. It may be our children, or our spouse. It may be a friend. It may be people in the Church or community who are following where we lead. If we lead them off a cliff because of poor vision, God will hold us accountable.
 

        Another way of identifying hypocrites in the ancient world was to notice inconsistency in behavior. Our ancestors in the Faith believed that human beings should behave consistently, even though many of them did not. How was consistency determined? The human body could be divided into three distinct yet interpenetrating symbolic zones: 1) eyes and heart - the eyes for gathering the information that the heart uses for making judgments; 2) mouth and ears - ears to collect opinions and mouth to share self-expressive speech; and 3) hands and feet - these body parts implement what one has learned or known. This is how the human person acts consistently, with all the symbolic body parts in sync: heart-eyes, mouth-ears, hands-feet. In other words, it is important that one’s emotion-fused thoughts (heart-eyes), self-expressive speech (mouth-ears), and purposeful activity (hands-feet) be perfectly coordinated. Anything else is stage acting.

     Production of good fruits is a sure-fire way of distinguishing good trees from the bad. St Bede explains this analogy in practical Christian context thus: “The treasure of the heart is the same as the root of the tree. A person who has a treasure of patience and of perfect charity in his heart yields excellent fruit; he loves his neighbor and has all the other qualities Jesus teaches; he loves his enemies, does good to him who hates him, blesses him who curses him, prays for him who calumniates him, does not react against him who attacks him or robs him; he gives to those who ask, does not claim what they have stolen from him, wishes not to judge and does not condemn, corrects patiently and affectionately those who err. But the person who has in his heart the treasure of evil does exactly the opposite: he hates his friends, speaks evil of him who loves him and does all the other things condemned by the Lord.” (In Lucae Evangelium Expositio, II, 6).