Saturday in the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle I
1Tim 1, 15-17 Lk 6, 43-49
Jesus is concerned with goodness in today's gospel. Just as good fruit is produced by a good tree, so our good actions can only flow out of a good heart. If there is evil in my heart, my actions cannot be be evil. Even if for a short while I can make believe that my actions are good, I would simply be putting on a mask that wears off easily.
Jesus also tells us how can we nurture a good heart that produces good fruit. It is only one that makes Jesus Christ its foundation. Once I spent a couple of months working at a drug rehabilitation unit run by the Archdiocese as part the Caritas program. There I made a lot of friends and I was struck by how many of them described their life as being completely destroyed and then being slowly rebuilt when they found Christ again in their life. This does not mean that life was without struggle; far from that. Rather what they means was that when they discovered Christ again in their life, they could rebuild everything again this time on a solid foundation, not one which is easily carried away by either by what others thought of them, or by their desires of pleasure or by their emotions.
Today we must take some time to reflect seriously on the fruit that we are producing. Large businesses give great importance to evaluating their performance. In a similar way, we must be able to identify what kind of fruit we are producing. Like the experienced customers at the fishmonger's or at the green grocer's we must be able to identify the good fish or the good fruit and evaluate whether we are truly rooted in Christ or not.
Once our heart is rooted in Christ, then out of our hearts will flow things that are of Christ.
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