Gospel Reflections
Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 March 2025, Church Year C
Words
Luke 6:39-45
Rev. Jack Peterson
Reprinted by
permission of "The
Arlington Catholic Herald"
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Our words can be so
powerfully
good. Recall the
gentle words of your
mother during a painful moment as a child: “Honey, don’t worry,
I love you, and
I will always love you.” Or,
How about those
words from a priest after one of your weakest moments in life,
“And I absolve
you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son
and of the Holy
Spirit,” Or, the
words from your high
school coach, “It has been a true joy coaching you, watching you
become a leader
and helping you to reach your potential at this level of
competition.”
At the same time, our
words can be so
painfully harmful. It
is so easy for our
broken human nature to tempt us to use our tongue to tear others
down, break
trust with lies, demean others with hurtful words or to unjustly
take from
others what is their due. We
know that
we can use God’s gift of words to build up others or tear down,
to encourage
unity or to be a cause of division, to express care or to
demonstrate hatred or
jealousy, and to extend God’s gift of forgiveness or to call out
faults in
public.
Our Old Testament
reading today from
the book of Sirach warns us to be careful and cautious with our
words: “When a
sieve is shaken, the husks appear; so do one’s faults when one
speaks . . .
Praise no one before he speaks, for it is then that people are
tested.” We really
do learn a lot about a person’s
character from what proceeds from their lips.
One possible Lenten
practice might be
to focus on our daily conversations as we examine our conscience
each
night. Am I
positive, encouraging,
humble and thoughtful in those conversations?
Or do I have a tendency to be negative, judgmental, proud
and
thoughtless?
In our Gospel today
Jesus invites us to
focus very particularly on how the sin of pride impacts our
interactions with
others. Pride is so
ugly. It drives us
to lord it over others when I am
in a position of authority (genuine or only perceived). It keeps us from being
fully aware and
genuinely grateful to God for his countless blessings. Pride invites us to
compare ourselves with
others constantly and to convince ourselves that we are so much
better than
those around us. Pride
blinds us to the
needs of those around us. In
particular,
Jesus points out how pride makes us so quick to point out the
faults of
everyone around us, making us quick to notice them, passionate
about pointing
them out in public, and quite skilled in the perfect advice to
help them correct
their many faults.
One (almost humorous if
it were not so
sad) fruit of the sin of pride is that we can be particularly
quick to point
out faults in others that we possess ourselves.
Most of us have fallen into this sin a time or two. This seems likely to
flow from a twisted and
broken way of skirting the pain of taking an honest look at
ourselves and diverting
our attention to calling out in others the sin that we
subconsciously or
consciously detest in our own lives
If we find ourselves
regularly pointing
out the faults of others, focusing on the splinter in another
person’s eye and
paying little attention to the plank on our own eye, I invite
you to ask
yourself the question, “Why am I so prone to this sin?” It is clear, that
Jesus wants his follows to
address this sinful tendency.
Am I aware
of this weakness? Am
I willing to turn
to Christ for help? Have
I asked Jesus
for healing, strength and virtue regarding this tendency? Am I willing to ask a
good friend to help me
look more objectively at how often I slide into this form of
pride?
Allow me to finish with
a few lines
from the letter to the Ephesians: “Never let evil talk pass your
lips; say only
the good things men need to hear, things that will really help
them. Do nothing
that will sadden the Holy Spirit
with whom you were sealed against the day of redemption. Get rid of all
bitterness, all passion and
anger, harsh words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be
kind to one another,
compassionate, and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven
you in Christ.”
(Eph. 4:29-32)