Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8-9; Matthew 7:15-20
Wednesday of the 12th week in Ordinary Time
Whenever
I or my family would travel in the Rocky Mountain National Parks of my home
province of Alberta, Jasper or Banff, I would get a chuckle out of one of the
t-shirts in the gift shops in these parks. The t-shirt I enjoyed features a bear
standing next to a sign, like the many real signs seen throughout these parks,
that reads, “Do not feed the bears.” The bear on the t-shirt wears a hat with
moose antlers, and carries a sign that says, “I am not a bear. Trust me.”
In
Matthew’s Gospel, today we hear Jesus warn us to “beware of false prophets, who
come to [us] in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.” Do we
not wish maybe that these “false prophets” would be easy to discern as if they
wore “sheep’s clothing” but held up a sign that read, “I am not a wolf, trust
me”? Unfortunately, when speaking of our faith, to differentiate “false
prophets,” those who deceive and distract us from the true and right priorities
of our faith, from those who speak and teach the truth, is occasionally not so
easy.
To
add to our challenge to discern real sheep from wolves “in sheep’s clothing,”
or good trees bearing good fruit from rotten trees bearing rotten fruit, do
Jesus’ pithy proverbs we hear today not sometimes work in different, even
opposite ways? On the one hand, even among self-professed Christians there are
people who do seek to seek to deceive and distract us from God and the true
priorities and ethics of our faith. At the risk of judging them too harshly myself,
I become especially irritated at people with authority who promote what I hear
as a charade of the Christian faith that more closely resembles idolatry of
wealth and prosperity, nationalism, militarism, or forms of xenophobia (a
rejection of anybody who does not look, think, or behave “like us”), than
anything Christ or his Apostles taught.
On
the other hand, I encounter brother and sister Christians (and I have been
guilty of this myself) who are at times too quick to seek errors in other Christians’
message or how their message is articulated and lived. Words like “heretic”
have become the most recent curse words from ostensibly-Christian media
outlets, especially but not only on the internet, against fellow believers who hold
differing views or struggle more openly to understand or live by some of the
Church’s teachings. Quick insults like this and the animosity that can exist
today even among Christians create and aggravate divisions and breed still
further animosity. Too-ready a search for wolves “in sheep’s clothing” risks
misjudging as wolves our sisters and brothers who are in fact sheep, if black
sheep, within our Church and even our social groups and families.
Please let me suggest these possible remedies to these
problems, for me as much as for each of us: The next time somebody says something
or acts in a way with which you disagree or that you think is wrong, make an
intentional effort to discern (if not write down) something good or true in the
other person’s message or action, even if the balance of this person’s message
or action is still wrong or erroneous. This intentional seeking of the good in
one another will help us to differentiate sheep from wolves, good trees and
their fruit from bad, while maintaining the charity for one another, especially
as Christians, which our Lord teaches us is the highest good of all.
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