This Sunday, Jesus Says to Fight Three Kinds of Pride This Lent

Because of where it falls in the Church calendar, The Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, often gets skipped. When it does come, it is usually right before Ash Wednesday.

That’s appropriate, because it is tremendous preparation for Lent.

First: in the Gospel, Jesus is doubling down on a message against pride.

In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus gives a whole series of brief sayings. Often, scholars suggest that Luke is simply compiling a “best of” collection of Jesus’s words in one place here, but that’s not necessarily the case. It could very well be that Jesus is doing what Hebrews often do — stringing together a number of parallel words of wisdom, driving a single point home through repetition with a little variety.

What point is he driving home? That you are required to improve others, but that means you have to improve yourself first.

There are three kinds of pride Jesus calls out in the Gospel:

• First, there is your spiritual pride, which thwarts those you are responsible for. Asks Jesus: “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?”
• Second is your intellectual pride, which results in compromising the teachings of Christ because, despite what we think: “No disciple is superior to the teacher.”
• Third is moral pride, which makes it impossible to correct others: “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eyes, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?”

All three kinds of pride are insidious because they convince us that we have nothing to change in our lives, that we have already reached the goal our life in Christ is tending toward. And this leaves us even more useless than if we had never met Jesus at all.

“For people do not pick figs from thornbushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles,” he says.

Second: This Gospel comes just in time, because Lent is the time to root out pride.

The traditional Lenten practices are tailor-made to undercut exactly these kinds of pride and help us to grow not in the appearance of holiness, but actual holiness.

First is spiritual blindness. We have so often indulged and excused the small lapses and luxuries and indiscretions that we hardly notice the extent to which we have embraced a consumerist lifestyle that is spiritually nearsighted.

In Lent, by fasting from those things we normally indulge in, we can see again all the excesses in our life that we are blind to,and break the bonds of slavery to them.

Then, Jesus warns of becoming blind to his truths. We have enjoyed so much ridicule of others in our entertainments and online — and have been so taken with superficiality and politics  — that we hardly notice that this has changed the way we understand the world.

In Lent, by praying more, we can see our lives from God’s point of view, giving us an objective view of our own state and others’ worth.

Third, Jesus warns that we are at risk of becoming blind to the needs of those around us. We have so often rehearsed our excuses for not serving the material and spiritual needs of others, and favored ourselves over them, that we often don’t even bother to rationalize it anymore.

And by almsgiving — giving more and doing more for others — we can train ourselves in the generosity we need to get out of ourselves.

Third: Lent is a preparation for Easter; or, as St. Paul says, a preparation for “incorruptibility.”

The Second Reading from St. Paul is all about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and how to prepare for it by internalizing it, saying:

“When this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality, then the word that is written shall come about:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

As St. Augustine explains, “The apostle Paul seems to have directly pointed his finger at the flesh when he wrote: “this which is corruptible must put on incorruptibility.”

“The sting of death is sin,” Paul adds. “But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Resurrection is the moment when Jesus deprives sin and death of its power, and our Easter is the moment when we share in his victory, if we are united with him.

St. Paul gives his own Lenten program in greatness: “Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Fourth: But don’t miss the fact that Jesus reveals the amazing truth about what is possible to us.

Don’t just focus on the difficulty Jesus’s words entail: Look at the high hopes his words give us.

Of course a blind guide cannot lead a blind person, but Jesus explains how a blind guide can become a true guide to other blind people:

“Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.”

Not only do we have the ability to restore our spiritual sight; we can restore sight to others.

And of course we only make things worse when we try to use our own wisdom to improve upon the Gospel, but Jesus says something huge: “when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.” That is quite a statement, one that says that our destiny is nothing less than to be like the Son of God himself.

And last, Jesus gives one of his greatest votes of confidence in us, ever. Ordinarily, as Jesus has said, “No one is good except God alone.” Here he explains how, united to God, we can become “a good person” for others. He says:

“A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of the store of evil produces evil.”

That is more than we could have expected.

Fifth: We can be very great, but we have to do the work.

The First Reading this Sunday gives Old Testament wisdom that amounts to: You can’t fool God.

“As the test of what the potter molds is in the furnace, so in tribulation is the test of the just,” it says. You can’t fake holiness; you have to embrace God and his will or you will fall apart in difficult times.

Then, it adds: “The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind.” It is what you actually do in life that God sees; not your feelings or your good intentions.

Lent allows you to face both of these: It begins in tribulation, when you have an ashen cross smeared on our head, fast, and hear the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It ends when we venerate the cross of Jesus Christ on Good Friday and then celebrate his Resurrection on Easter Sunday, bringing to him the heart we changed or didn’t change through the long days of Lent.

Lent is all about confronting the inevitability of our death and doing all that is necessary to align ourselves with the only way out of death, which is in Jesus Christ.

It is a 40-day program of conforming ourselves to Jesus, and leaving our weakness behind in favor of his greatness.

Image: The Blind Leading the Blind, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wikimedia.

By Tom Hoopes