He also told them this parable: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit? The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Luke 6:39-42) In this text, Jesus offers the best description of social media to date: “the blind leading the blind.” It seems our whole society is falling into a pit as a result. But, pot shots against social media aside, there’s something really important in Jesus’ words here for our particular cultural moment.
We get really excited about commenting on current issues and events. Certainly we have our thoughts about the current protests in Ottawa and the government response. Many folks have thoughts on the conversations around gender, sexuality, and orientation. There are many other examples.
Closer to home though, we tend to make judgements and speak into the lives of others that to us seem to be making mistakes or bad decisions. We want to inform and correct those we see stepping into sin. Arising from the evangelical or popular Christian world that many of us are influenced by, there is a compulsion drilled into us to proactively seek or act to correct the errant ways in others. They need to know what they’re doing is wrong, and we feel like the Christian faith requires us to tell them.
But does it? It seems to me in the very least that quite a long list of prior criteria must be met before we’re even allowed to. Are we the right person? Is our heart in the right place to hold the weight of someone else’s sin with the love and compassion it requires as Jesus did? Do we even see or understand the situation and our faith clearly enough to weigh in?
Jesus’ words here flip the conversation around entirely as he points out that we ought to be far more concerned about the planks in our own eyes than we are about the specks in someone else’s. Jesus is never nearly as concerned about someone else’s character or sin as he is about your own. I do believe he means us to take the same approach. Hence Jesus’ stern words against judging or condemning others in the preceding verses. This is the same Jesus who said “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The Christian faith begins with humility, surrender, and submission. We submit to God—to whom all of us are finally accountable. Slowly in the presence of God, we discover the sins and faults in our own hearts and lives. And, as the Spirit enables us, we confess these sins, repent, and receive forgiveness. Slowly but surely, Christian character—the character of Jesus—is formed within us. A character that looks like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Perhaps when we begin to see each of these fruit regularly and consistently in our lives and when others can verify that they see the same, perhaps then we’ve come to a place where we’re ready to attend to the speck in someone else’s eye. But only after a long, humbling, submissive journey with our Lord where we ourselves have learned from him what it is to be a sinner met, healed, and restored with loving grace, compassion, and forgiveness. And even then, I don’t know that we are ever to be eager to do it. Perhaps only willing, when called upon, as an act of loving submission to the God to whom both of us must give an account.
How might this word from Jesus change the way that you engage with others this week and with the sins you perceive in their lives? How different might our world be because of it?