"I" Checkup
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March 1, 2025Jesus goes right into the eyes, heart and life of anyone who wants to be his disciple - a disciple must know how to identify where his blind spot is, a disciple must always seek to learn from his teacher and knows his teacher well, and a disciple must always have the humility to look at himself first before pointing his finger to others.
Our Gospel this 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time is a continuation of the Sermon on the Plane. After Jesus challenged his disciples and us through the beatitudes and the kind of love we need and ought to share with one another even to our enemies, he confronts us now and do the ‘I’ checkup.
In the scriptures, we usually refer to blindness not just the physical thing but we also underline the spiritual blindness.Someone says, “Satan will allow unbelievers to do all sorts of spiritual things, - go to Church, read their Bible, get baptized, give to the poor and many other spiritual things as long as they don’t understand and believe in the message of the Gospel.” These are the blindness spirituality that needs healing. But even if a spiritual blindness has been healed,there is this side that we need to identify as our blind spot.These are the areas that we conveniently ignore, areas of vision we think we see but really we cannot. It is possible that we become complacent with so many things because we attend Mass, we receive communion, we read the Bible and contribute to the Church and so we think we are goodenough. But as disciples of Jesus, we must always have time to have an ‘I’ checkup. Examine and identify the areas that ‘I’ have taken for granted. It might be relationships, it might be a friend or it might be a commitment to serve.
As a disciple, we must always be open to new sights, new understanding, new guides, and a learner each day. This opens up the value of humility. No matter how wide and far we’ve been through, there is always room for improvement. As a student, a disciple, we should do again the ‘I’ checkup. Whom I listen to? From whom I follow instructions and guide? A Godly teacher will always point us to God through the Scriptures and not himself. And of course, we should always give chance to the great Teacher, - Jesus. As disciples of him, strive to live by his examples. Allow him to form or even reform the way we deal with life and with other people.
“You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.” (Luke 6:42) Jesus did not mince his words. A disciple must be able to look at himself clearly in front of the mirror. Many would think of themselves as the one with the speck in their eye and everybody else as the ones with the logs. There might be an obsession to seek faults of others to make ourselves better than the rest. But as disciples of Jesus, we do again the ‘I’ checkup. Judging others is the sin of those who are blind to their own sins and mistakes. Is the‘wooden beam’ in our eyes so big that we don’t see anymore of the good things in others? That ‘wooden beam’ in our own eye hardly qualifies us to judge the faults of other people. Overlooking our own failures will not make us good disciples. We’ve done those ‘I’ checkups. Get ready to have an ‘I’ surgery or better yet, ‘I’ replacement.
