Friday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Paul (First Timothy 1:1-2, 12-14) reminds me of one of my own teachers in faith. Alex often talked about the way he “used to be.” He used to fight with everyone tooth and nail, always wanting to be the winner in a fight, always belittling opponents, making people purposefully mad, going exactly for the spots he knew were the weakest. He had admirers, but many more people who were afraid of him. He himself admired a few people, but most didn’t quite make the cut. In his pre-apostle days, I imagine Paul was much like that: out to get any Christians he could lay hands on, angry at these Christians for messing up “his” faith, persecuting people as much as he possibly could. In the passage Paul refers to a miraculous turnaround on the road to Damascus, when he was blinded by God and gained faith in Jesus. Alex’s story is a similar miraculous story, to my way of thinking, for I believe Alex would have kept on in his arrogant ways, except that one day a person he admired a great deal passed away. He showed up to the funeral, presuming that he would be one of the few people there because he assumed that his deceased friend, Matt, was like him – so much had they enjoyed arguing with each other and talking about the flaws in other peoples’ arguments. To Alex’s great surprise, the church was packed, standing room only, with all the very people he wouldn’t have expected to be there. And one by one, each of those people stood up and proclaimed how great a friend Matt had been to them. “Sure, we argued,” the funeral attenders would say. “But he always wanted to help people out, he was always hospitable, offering tea, coffee, something to eat. In the end, I got better at arguing, and gained a good friend that I will miss dearly.” At that moment, Alex saw the log in his own eye and has spent the years since then in a complete turnaround, telling others about the changes in his own life. He is welcoming, engaging, hospitable. People seek him out. He has many friends, and I do not doubt that one day when he has his own funeral (God willing, several years from now), his friends will show up in droves. This change did not really happen overnight, though I do believe that Alex’s mind changed overnight. But Alex had to work slowly and steadily at repairing broken relationships and establishing new ones in a better way. That takes lots of time, and a desire to spend the time to do it. Alex refers to himself as a disciple-in-training. I would not tell this story at all except for the fact that Alex’s own story was the splinter that helps me see the log in my own eye, as Jesus suggests in the gospel (Luke 6:39-42). Alex was not my teacher in any traditional sense, but knowing him, among others, has taught me something about what it means to be a Christian. When I first met Alex I was experiencing some Paul-like days too. My Paul-days were a bit different: I was the annoying know-it-all in meetings and classes; at a supermarket, I might hurry into a check out lane to get ahead of someone else with more groceries even if they were ahead of me in the initial “race”; at home, I always wanted to win the arguments even when I knew I was hurting someone I love. That’s the great thing about teachers like Alex – people who’ve been through something like that and help you see something new about yourself, precisely because they themselves have turned around. Alex is a teacher, and so are many other people. But the gospel takes it even further: Jesus is the ultimate teacher. And while I think some people might throw up their hands in despair and say, “I’ll never be like Jesus. He is perfect,” I think that Jesus himself is saying in today’s scripture that we MUST be like him. But becoming like Jesus is not an overnight thing. We are disciples in training, constantly learning to see the logs in our own eyes, by following Jesus. - Jana M. Bennett