Blind Self-Reliance
Eighth Sunday Scripture Readings
Once again, in today’s gospel passage, we see how Luke has turned the Christian message away from the context of first century Israel and Judaism and toward the universal Church after Pentecost. Where Matthew aimed Jesus’s words at the scribes and Pharisees, criticizing them for the superficiality of their religious observances, Luke shifts the subjects to Jesus’s disciples themselves. As we’ve seen before, Luke doesn’t just intend his audience to be limited to those disciples who were physically present when Jesus spoke, but he expands the term “disciples” to include those who were reading or hearing his gospel. That means not just back then, but down to those of us who heard it today. His warning to us is the same as his warning to them: don’t yield to the temptation to become complacent—or worse—as the scribes and Pharisees had done.
It’s never a good idea to come away from an encounter with the gospels saying, “Those poor people…if only they’d listened.” The message of the gospel is never just for “them,” but it’s always also and primarily for us. Luke is redirecting Jesus’s words toward us and warning us about spiritual blindness. That blindness is a result of taking the spiritual foundation of our lives for granted. The most obvious sign of spiritual blindness appears when we say, in our words or our actions, “I’ve got this.” When we pretend that we’ve got life or anything else under our control, we descend into spiritual blindness because we fail to see our own powerlessness. As blind people, we fall into the trap of self-reliance, we squeeze our utter dependence on God out of our consciousness, and we take those who are depending on us down with us. When we descend into self-reliance, we lie. We’re acting as if there is some aspect of our lives where God is superfluous because we’ve taken it over, and now we’re in charge.
Our teacher, the Christ, has shown himself to be entirely reliant on his Heavenly Father. Not only did he pray in the garden of Gethsemane, “Not my will but yours be done,” [Luke 22:41-42] but he surrendered himself entirely to it. In no way did he try to alter or even influence the trajectory of his life as he saw it unfolding according to his Father’s will. We should understand that Jesus could have refused at any moment to do the will of God, but he did not. He taught us the meaning of acceptance and surrender and even to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Our temptation is to say, “Well, that was Jesus; this is me. I know I can handle this. I can’t imagine that I can’t do it my way.” And when we think that, aren’t we making ourselves, the disciples, greater than our master?
Our arrogant self-reliance renders us blind. We don’t see our own blindness. We don’t appreciate our inability to control our own lives, let alone critique the lives of others. When we presume to correct others, aren’t we, in effect, claiming we know what’s best for them? Though we’re not even aware of our own faults and failings, yet do we presume to address them in others? Throughout this entire passage, through Luke’s retelling of the story, Jesus is calling his disciples to self-awareness rather than self-sufficiency. You see, when, as disciples, we become self-aware, we come to realize our powerlessness and our utter dependence on God. Those who are self-aware don’t criticize others because they realize they’re disqualified from making any such judgments. Jesus might as well have said, “Remove the beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly how incapable you are of removing the splinter from your brother’s eye.”
He calls his disciples—that is, us—hypocrites when we fail to see our powerlessness. The Greek term for hypocrite means an actor on the stage. They pretend to be characters who they’re not. When we’re being hypocritical, whether it’s pretending we’re in control, or pretending the rules don’t apply to us, or pretending we’re qualified to direct someone else’s life, we’re only play-acting. When we perform a phony action, we produce a phony result. Imagine someone who lacks the knowledge and power to fix a problem and who then tries to fix it. They might declare the problem fixed, but it would only be a pretend solution. The problem is bound to continue, if not get worse. That’s why Jesus said, “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.” In contemporary terms, that’s like saying, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
Since we need to accept our powerlessness, does that mean that we should just do nothing or give up? What do you think? Did Jesus do nothing? All our actions, done with humility, recognizing our total reliance on God, will have immeasurable value. If we rely on God and do whatever is possible to the best of our ability and leave the results up to God, we’ll find success, even in the midst of apparent failure. Isn’t that, after all, the message of the cross? It was Christ’s ultimate surrender of himself and his own plans and designs in acceptance of the Father’s will that led him through death to life, destroying death in the process. The cross, the symbol of failure par excellence, became the symbol of victory. God can and does transform our failures into his successes. We are Christ’s disciples, and we follow in the footsteps of our master.
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