Today’s Gospel reading picks up where we left off last week, with Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain as related by Luke. Jesus begins with the familiar parable about removing the beam from one’s own eye before volunteering to remove the splinter from another’s eye…in other words, approaching the world and all its problems with a large degree of humility. No one likes to feel inferior to the person trying to “help” them; and as we learned last week, being judgmental is not what Jesus teaches us to do.
Jesus moves on to talk about how “a good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.” Another quote, “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” This is not a new concept in Jesus’ time, as noted in the first reading from Sirach; “The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind.” The question becomes, how do we ensure that we are “good trees” that produce “good fruit?” Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus says that He is the vine, and we are the branches. We all know that a branch is nothing without the vine; we need to ensure that we are doing all we can to stay attached to our Vine. That likely means different things to different people, but we all need to pay attention to this important detail, for without being firmly rooted in Jesus, we cannot produce good fruit. Reflection by St. Catherine’s parishioner, John Ceglarek