8th Sunday in Ordinary time 2022
Sirach 27: 4-7; 1 Cor 15:54-58; Luke 6: 39-45
“Can one blind man guide another?” But who are the blind? There is a saying that “There are none so blind as those who will not see” and you and I would probably go along with that.
We, of course, can see everything clearly: it is other people who are blind. Why on earth do they not have the vision to see things as we see them, whether in matters of religion, ethics, politics, sport, or whatever? How can referees be so blind as to fail to see blatant fouls against my team? How can umpires be so blind as to turn down obvious LBW appeals? There are so many blind people around: thank goodness you and I can see.
Our Lord warns us today against this attitude of superiority. He calls us “disciples” and a disciple is one who is always learning, and who always needs to learn. The root of the word is the Latin verb discere, meaning “to learn”. The Greek word for “disciple” is “mathetes”, from which comes “mathematics”: I am glad we have more important things than maths to learn.
And that learning is a lifelong process. Returning to the ancient Greeks, we may recall their saying “I grow old, always learning” or, as we put it, “you are never too old to learn”. Indeed, we MUST never be too old to learn the things of God. Our daily prayer must always involve an openness to God, allowing Him to speak in the depths of our being, opening the scriptures to us, revealing the mysteries of the Kingdom, guiding us along the path which He has marked out for us.
What is true for us as individuals is equally true for the Church, which must never be a static entity, immoveable, its face firmly turned to the past. Of course the Church must always learn from the past, must be true to what has been handed down—the real meaning of “tradition”. But tradition is a living thing, the work of a living Church. It should not be, cannot be, the clinging to a certain moment or era of our past, but involves a continuity and a growth. St. John Henry Newman wrote a famous essay “On the Development of Doctrine”, and the Second Vatican Council spoke of the Church as “the pilgrim people of God”.
Doctrine is developing because we are disciples, always learning from the past, but learning new insights under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As disciples, we are always on pilgrimage within the Kingdom and towards the fullness of the Kingdom. We would be blind indeed if we were to plant our feet firmly in one moment of history, refusing to advance any further along our pilgrim way, as those have done who, over the centuries, have rejected the teaching of successive Councils of the Church, including the Second Vatican Council.
Elsewhere in the Gospels, Our Lord encourages us to be like wise householders, who take from our store things both old and new. But we must be careful to do this always as disciples, as people who learn, who are conscious that we do not have all the answers, that we have our own share of blindness.
Hence, Jesus gives us the warning not to be presumptuous, not to think that we know it all. We do still have planks in our eyes, whether these be our lack of knowledge, or our own particular prejudices, which should make us hesitant to attempt to correct others, whose own splinters may be tiny in comparison with our own handicaps to understanding. This puts me in mind of the more fanatical evangelicals, who will attempt to “convert” Catholics, blissfully unaware of the limits of their own understanding arising from a blinkered reading of the scriptures, set against the accumulated discipleship of the Church in the course of two thousand years.
Always, we must retain that attitude of discipleship, so that, when we do speak, our words will be, as both Jesus and the author of the First Reading demand, an expression of goodness and a fruitful gift to our hearers.
