“No disciple is superior to the teacher; but when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.”
As Christians we seek to follow Christ, the Light of the World (John 8:12) who says “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” We are not being led by a blind man, yet Jesus desires that we serve as guides for others; He says that we, too, are to be the light of the world and give “light to all in the house”which shines before all (Matthew 5:13-16). In our call to be disciples of Jesus lies a call to be like Him, to be re-fashioned more and more into the image and likeness of our Master. Is this our desire as Christians? Do we want to be re-made: do we strive to imitate Jesus in all that we do?
“…every tree is known by its own fruit,” and a Christian is no different. Jesus has chosen you to “bear fruit that will remain” (John 15:16), and so it is good to consider what bounty we bring before Him day to day. St. Paul gives us a good list of the kinds of fruit appropriate to our call: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Yet we know that bearing such fruit is not always easy; God must prune us (John 15:2), sometimes in painful ways, cutting away anything that impedes our growth in the life of Christ. How often, though, do we spurn those shears! We must allow God to cut away all that is sinful in us, even if in our disordered attachments we wish to cling to some things. If we do not allow God to prune away the sin in our hearts—especially in the context of the Sacrament of Confession—how can we hope to produce the fruits of the Spirit? “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,” our Gospel tells us today, “but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil.” In calling us to follow Him Jesus aims to cleanse the root—the heart—of each of His disciples, that they may produce good fruit.
“At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11). The Christian life is challenging; being a disciple requires discipline, and the discipline needed to be freed from slavery to sin often requires sacrifice and even some suffering: allowing Christ to remove the beam in our eye is no easy task. When we attempt to remove this beam we only end up making ourselves even more blind. If we are to truly be followers of Jesus Christ, we must have the humility to let Him shape us, teach us, and even discipline us, to re-shape us into other Christ’s, to prune us from being trees rooted in the world and its slavery to sin, to being trees rooted in God and freedom, producing abundant fruit for His glory and the good of others. This means, then, going to the Tree that saves us, that gives us new life, that bore the Fruit of the Virgin’s Womb, the Fruit God commands us to eat if we want eternal life (John 6:53): this Tree is the Cross (Acts 5:30). Though it was barren and without blossom or leaf, it bore the most beautiful, most noble fruit of all. Will we dare to be refashioned by God’s hand to bear that same Fruit in the world by our words and deeds?