Scripture Reflections for the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year C, Lectionary 84
God is asking us to notice and understand what is inside our hearts. If we are full of ego and worldly concerns we will speak and produce ungodly lives. Only when we make space for God in our lives can we speak, see and live as God intends. To not have Jesus as our guide will leave us blindly falling into the pit.
Hate feeling lost on Sundays at church? Searching for a better explanation of the Bible than what you hear from your pastor's sermon? Check out the following collection of audio, video, and text commentaries from various Christian experts for a better understanding of today's scripture that deal with: Blame • Body • Change • Death • Disciple • Dorothy Day • Faith • Focus • Foundation • Fruit • Guide • Hate • Humility • Hypocrite • Integrity • Intention • Judgment • Lead • Learn • Love • Model • Praise • Pride • Prune • Recognize • Reconciliation • Remember • Repent • Resurrection • Share • Sight • Sin • Speech • St. Katharine Drexel • Teach • Transformation • Wisdom •
“And it's fascinating because the image that he's using there for the resurrected body is he's comparing it to a garment that we can take off or put on”
“Why don't we allow the planks in our eyes to keep us humble? Allow the planks in our eyes to, to remind us that we're just like everybody else who's making a mistake today.”
“Good intentions is wanting people to conform to our good. Good actions is working on our own selves so we could see the good in the other rather than focusing on something minute in them, and that's what removes the blindness.”
“It's very easy to hate other people's sin with passion. It's much more difficult to learn to hate your own sin far more than you hate anyone else's and that's really what Jesus is trying to teach us to do.”
“we would want to be beamless not only to serve the ones that we love who are looking up to us but even to serve our enemy”
“I'm not in charge of the fruit bearing. I'm not in charge of the productivity. I'm tasked with being the connector, the channel of God's grace”
“it is the inside we have to work on. That's why we have to pray. That's why we have to continue to ask God to form us, to strengthen us on the inside.”
“Christian discipleship is the journey to wholeness, eventually becoming through God’s grace what God always intended us to be. Integrity, therefore, is a harmony between a person’s interior and exterior life.”
“Do we not condemn in others what we excuse in ourselves?”
“What do we need to stop talking about and instead be about? Maybe we can prune away those things in our lives that aren't helping us in our Christian witness”
“For great wisdom can be found and excavated when you and I discover our vulnerability...and grow through the fears that keep us blind”
“The tension we're experiencing in today's world isn't between good people and bad people. It's between open-handed people and closed-fisted people. Between people who cultivate compassion or contempt for those who have less or appear different.”
“The first reading today notes that it is in adversity that the inner disposition is revealed. So difficulties do not change people, rather difficulties reveal the true nature of people.”
“Loving my neighbors...has almost nothing to do with judging them or trying to fix them but it most certainly has to do with looking at myself, considering what needs remedy in my own mindset, my own pride, my own pettiness, my own politics”
“when somebody makes that transition towards the kingdom of heaven we understand that you feel the pain of loss but if that's the only thing you feel, if that's the only thing that stays on your mind then maybe you don't believe what we say we believe”
“I think we slowly can become blind in which we don't seek the Lord. And the seeking of the Lord is seeing him as truth.”
