Anyone who has driven west at the end of an afternoon knows the moment. The light hits the windscreen and the road disappears behind a grey smear, and we blame the sun, the dust, the other drivers, until we realise the film of grime is on the inside of the glass, and it has been there for months.
Now he told them another comparison: "How can the blind lead the blind? Would they not both fall into a pit? The disciple is not above his teacher. But each one will be perfected, if he is like his teacher. And why do you see the straw that is in your brother's eye, while the log that is in your own eye, you do not consider? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Brother, allow me to remove the straw from your eye,' while you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? Hypocrite, first remove the log from your own eye, and then will you see clearly, so that you may lead out the straw from your brother's eye." (Lk 6:39-42)
Jesus is not lecturing a crowd of strangers here. He is speaking to disciples, to people he is about to send out to teach, and the first thing he wants them to consider is the state of their own eyes. Two blind men walking arm in arm end up in the same ditch, and there is no villain in that story. Nobody set out to do harm. They simply could not see, and neither of them knew it.
Then comes the sentence we usually walk straight past, on our way to the more entertaining business of beams and straws. "The disciple is not above his teacher. But each one will be perfected, if he is like his teacher." That is the hinge of the whole passage. Before Jesus asks us whom we are correcting, he asks us whom we have allowed to form us. We do not become clear-sighted by trying harder to be fair. We become like whoever has been teaching us to look.
And that formation happens quietly, mostly without our consent. We pick up the accent of the people we live among, their turns of phrase, their sense of humour, and, without noticing, their habits of judgement. A person who spends an hour a day with voices that mock will eventually mock. A person who spends that hour with the Gospel will start, slowly, to see the way the Gospel sees. Nobody is neutral. We are all being formed by something, and the only real choice is whether we choose our teacher or let the loudest voice take the job.
Then Jesus makes a joke. It is worth saying plainly, because we have heard the line so often that we no longer notice how ridiculous it is: a construction beam, a roof timber, sticking out of a man's eye while he leans in with delicate fingers to fish a speck of chaff out of his neighbour's. The exaggeration is a mercy. Humour gets under our defences where accusation only hardens them. We laugh, and while we are laughing the point slips in.
Notice, too, how exactly the Lord describes our condition. He does not say that we cannot see the beam. He says that we do not consider it, we do not take it into account. Our own faults are rarely invisible to us; they are simply exempt from examination. We have explanations for them. We know the circumstances. Of everything in our life, the one thing we have never studied with fresh eyes is ourselves.
And what is the beam, usually? Not some spectacular sin. More often it is the settled certainty that we are the ones who see clearly, the reflex of explaining, directing and assessing, the quiet conviction that our reading of a situation is simply the situation. That kind of blindness is comfortable. It even feels like competence.
Saint Paul knew the danger from the inside. Today he writes that preaching gives him nothing to boast about, because it is a necessity laid upon him, and he adds that terrible line, woe to me if I do not preach. Then he describes what a formed guide actually looks like: free with regard to all, he makes himself the slave of all, weak with the weak, all things to all. He does not stand above the people he serves; he goes down to where they are. And he ends with the runner and the athlete, the discipline, the crown that does not fade, and the honest fear of proclaiming the message to others and being disqualified himself. The man who trains his own body is the exact opposite of the man with a beam in his eye. He has agreed to be examined.
Something of this is written into the way God chose to come to us. He did not arrive as an inspector with a clipboard, or as a teacher raised on a platform above our heads. He came as an infant at Bethlehem, at eye level with animals and shepherds, unable to correct anybody, in a body that could only receive. A child does not reproach us, and yet nobody changes a household more thoroughly. That is the light that gets our beam out: not a searchlight aimed at our faults, but a small lamp carried close, in front of which we finally stop defending ourselves.
Now hear how the passage ends, because we usually stop one clause too early. Jesus does not say: leave the straw where it is and mind your own business. He says, first remove the log from your own eye, and then will you see clearly, so that you may lead out the straw from your brother's eye. The helping gesture stays. It is the goal. He wants the speck out of his brother's eye, and he wants a hand near that eye that can be trusted not to make things worse. Anyone who has ever taken a grain of sand out of a child's eye knows what that requires: getting very close, holding steady, going slowly, waiting until the other stops flinching.
So here is one concrete thing for today. There is probably a sentence about someone that we have been rehearsing, and it may even be true. Before we say it, let us take one minute to name honestly what is in our own eye about that same person, whether it is impatience, wounded pride, or an old comparison we never settled. Then, if the sentence still needs saying, it will come out differently, and the other will be able to hear it. And second: let us choose, for this week, one voice we will actually be formed by, and give it a real place in the day.
The Lord does not want us blind, and he does not want us silent. He wants us close enough to a brother's face to be trusted with his eyes.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Father, you know the things we never examine, and you love us without waiting for us to notice them. Take out of our eyes whatever keeps us from seeing our brothers and sisters as you see them, and do it gently, in your own time. Teach us to choose our teachers well, so that we may be formed by your Son and not by the loudest voices around us. Give us hands steady enough and hearts patient enough to help without wounding, and the humility to be helped in return. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Who is really forming the way we look at other people this week?
- What is the thing in us that we have never once put under examination?
- Whose eyes are we called to come close to today, gently, and not from above?
