1. "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.
2. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you
give will be the measure you get. 3. Why do you see the speck in your
neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4. Or how can
you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the
log is in your own eye? 5. You hypocrite, first take the log out of your
own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's
eye." ~ Matthew 7:1-5
When I was a graduate student at UCSB I went to an
experimental psychology symposium in Campbell Hall on human perception – how we
see and perceive what goes on around us. The speaker led the four or five
hundred of us in an experiment that I will never forget. He asked us to watch
the big movie screen behind him which contained students wearing white and
black t-shirts with a basketball and asked us to count carefully the number of
passes of the basketball by players wearing white t-shirts. After watching for
thirty seconds and counting very deliberately and rhythmically the passing of
the ball, the speaker stopped the video and asked a question that I was not
expecting? Did you see the gorilla? He then showed us the same video but asked
us not to focus on the ball but at the participants. When we did so, another
student walked across the frame in a full gorilla costume, stopped in the
middle and beat upon his chest, and then walked off. I couldn’t believe that I
never saw it. This morning I invite you
to be mindful of what you do and don’t see.
Hopefully you will see the gorilla but I pray that you would also see
something else – that you would see a loving community drawn together by God
not by whim, centered upon Jesus not by some shared interest, willing to
confess its sin and care compassionately for one another by the power of the
Spirit rather than extol arrogant judgment.
What do we fail to see and what do we condemn because we
fail to understand? Or as Jesus asks us this morning, “Why do you see the
speck?”
1. The reason that I
see the speck is simply because I go looking for it.
Why am looking for it? Well, that’s easy. Because I want to feel better about myself.
Because then my own sins seem smaller. I
want to claim superiority – an “I’m up and you’re down”; “I know and you don’t”
perspective of power that helps me focus on your mistakes and not my own.
I may even try and help people in this patronizing sort of way making the one
on the receiving end feel like a project.
But I think my motives are even murkier than that. It’s also
because I do care about right and wrong, what’s true and what’s not. And that’s okay, right? I mean to discern
between right and wrong is a biblical command and is no more silly or offensive
than to assess a bridge to make sure it is sound or to test a medical student
to be sure she knows enough to practice medicine. So that word “judge” can trip us up if we are
not careful. The Gospel of Luke helps us out here because it further clarifies
Jesus’ meaning by using the word “condemn.” Jesus’ point then is that even our
best intentioned judging can easily lead us to condemn someone – to say they
are, or should be, beyond God.
To condemn is to claim the superhuman ability to act and
speak as only God can. It is the claim to see perfectly into someone’s heart,
to speak casually about the nature or state of someone’s soul or worse to believe
that while we are blind we see everything. It’s when interpretation become fact
and what someone does becomes all that that person is. It’s when we choose to
base people’s worth not on the grace or forgiveness of God or even right or
wrong but in relationship to ourselves. How do you know when you are looking
for specks while nursing a log? Well, it’s when you talk like a Pharisee. Luke
18:11 – When you quite casually pray, “O God I thank you that I am not like
other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or tax collectors.” It’s when you
speak about morality and your frame of reference is always the first person,
“I”. Basically, Jesus says, you practice condemning when you see people as
specks – as only sinful! To make such a pronouncement is not discerning
between right and wrong but to stand in God’s stead and to cross the line from
a healthy notion of trying to be holy to attempting to be God. But as Jesus
reminds us – we’re not gods, we’re not even one-eyed gods but one-eyed humans.
This brings us to that dreaded word in Jesus’ warning –
hypocrite. What does that mean? But first let’s be sure of what a hypocrite is
not. A hypocrite is not someone who fails to practice those virtues that he
preaches. It is not a failure to do or say what one believes. If that were the case then the whole of
Christianity is one big hypocrisy – yet Christianity teaches that we are speck
and log people. No, a better source of meaning surrounds the debate about the
origins of the term. Some scholars argue that “hypocrite” comes from the world
of the theater and can translate as “play-acting,” it involves the active
deception of others by pretending to do or believe something that you
knowingly do not. It’s not finding a log in your eye that makes you a hypocrite
– it’s when you put make-up on it and call it an eye-lash that does. Other
scholars have argued, however, that “hypocrite” comes from the verb meaning to
sift or decide and implies a deficiency on the part of the person to make a
correct decision and their refusal to admit that deficiency. It’s someone with a vocation who knowingly
cannot carry out its duties – it’s when you ask me about cars and I use the
fancy language that I learned from my mechanic grandfather without any sense of
being able to fix anything on a car. The first reflects our inability to
confess that we are sinners and the second our inability to confess that we are
not God.
2. A second reason that I see the speck is because I fail
to understand the real nature of sin.
Self appointed speck pullers fail to wrestle with one
very critical element of sin – it’s connection to our knowledge of good and
evil. Let’s return to the Genesis story. Do you remember what it
says about sin?
“The LORD God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of
every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you
shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ “ (Gen.
2:16-17). But the Serpent says, “you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
What is the root and essence of sin? It is the desire to know good and evil.
How can that be true? Is not the whole point in going to church, reading the
Bible, praying, and trying to live a Christian life precisely to learn the
difference between good and evil so that we can be good and not evil? Well,
we’ve already discussed how knowledge of right and wrong can make act like God
but there are two more problems that such knowledge creates.
The Genesis story reminds us that the desire to be like
God knowing good and evil creates hatred against others. Who are more
dangerous than people who are so sure that they know what is good and what is
not good? Who are more judgmental than those who believe they don’t need to be
judged themselves? What crimes against fellow human beings have been committed
by “good people” who are sure of their own superior wisdom and virtue? History
is replete with horrific activity perpetrated by people who think they are like
God, knowing good and evil. This is precisely the point of Paul in Romans 1
& 2 who after giving a withering polemic against sexual immorality quoted
in debates about homosexuality argues “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever
you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn
yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” No good
person has a secure platform to stand upon in order to pronounce condemnation
on others. We all are capable of twisting goodness to suit our own purposes and
for your own ends. E.G. Jordan and the balloon animal – turns it into a sword,
changes its name
But this danger extends not only to those with specks but
also those with logs. All-too-willing-speck-spotters are a danger to
themselves. People dehumanized by their presumed knowledge of good and evil
may be worse off than those injured by addiction to liquor or drugs, or by
sexual immorality, because they don’t even know that they have destroyed
themselves and are desperately in need of forgiveness and help. The Pharisees
at the time of Jesus are proof of this. These are the people who missed Jesus.
These are the people that Jesus refers to a white-washed tombs. These are the
people who kill him, In the Gospel story, the good people are the bad
guys. The only way to address the
thinking that we are one-eyed gods and the supposed disgust we have for the
sinfulness of the world is to start with carefully scrutinizing our own sin –
to confess first hand its insidious, crippling and blinding power over our
lives. Only when we understand this, and get beyond thinking of sin as mere
immorality, can we know and mean what we are saying when we confess in church
that “there is no health in us.” Only when we learn that however moral,
law-abiding, and religious we are, we are still sinners – only then will we
understand the power of sin in our lives. For some of us this will mean that
all we can confess is that we’re blind.
3. The third reason
we see the speck is because we see a brother or sister in need.
Jesus’ words are not a call to be a roaming street surgeon
or an individual speck finder but to a relationship where there is already
trust, concern, care, as well as mutual benefit – welcome to the Society of
Mutual Eye Impairment due to Specks or Logs or as I like to call it “church.”
Maybe we should just pass out eye patches to everyone upon entering.
In fact, what’s so interesting is that Jesus employs
familial language three times – neighbors, meaning “brothers and sisters.”
Now, some writers point out that the image’s violence, its
totality is meant to silence any and all criticism or correction. They rightly
point out that if you take Jesus’s joke seriously then to dislodge a log from
your own eye is to become effectively blind. But while this interpretation is
possible. I don’t find it likely for a number of reasons:
First, the Bible offers ample evidence, even direct
statements about correcting brothers or sisters gently – Matt. 18:15-20;
Galatians 6:1-5. It’s interesting that there is a “then”, that the
text is not saying that I should only be concerned with myself. It’s easy, in
other words, to make the opposite of hypocrisy – private individualism or a
pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps-spirituality to understand the verse as
saying, “Look, you lazy one eyed freak, just worry about yourself!” We need to
remember that for many of us even small specks can create a great amount of
pain and eyes are sensitive things.
Should we simply ignore our brother or sister’s pain? That’s a good rule
of thumb, by the way, let the pain be your guide.
Second, while you may have lost an eye in Jesus’ joke, you still have another one, which means you will have to work that much more slowly and carefully with others. In other words, once you deal directly with your own beam, how you treat your brothers and sisters will no longer have the character of judging – only compassion, empathy and love. You will understand because you have faced your own sin head on. You will acknowledge your own disability and find greater ability because of it.
Gandhi illus.- One day a mother came to Gandhi with her little boy for help. She asked Gandhi, “Please, Bapu, will you tell my little boy to stop eating sugar. He simply eats too much sugar and will not stop.” Gandhi told the mother to leave and come back with the boy in three days.The mother returned with her son and said to Gandhi, “We have come back as you asked.” Gandhi turned to the boy and said, “Young boy, stop eating sweets. They are not good for you.”The mother then asked Gandhi, “Bapu, why didn’t you tell my son that when we first came to see you? Why did you ask us to leave and come back in three days? I don’t understand.”
Third, the warning of the text offers a surprising
relational reward. “The measure that
you give will be the measure that you get.” We have already talked about the
fact that God has reserved some activity for himself alone – judging or
condemning is something only God can do and if we read the Bible at all we
should often be shocked by the judgments that he makes. But – there is another
activity that God is all too willing to allow us to do – forgive. And as we pray in the Lord’s prayer that
forgiveness has a direct correlation to our own. So leave this place today
brimming, overflowing with forgiveness. Give it freely, lavishly, and openly
In the movie The Doctor, William Hurt plays Jack
McKee, a surgeon who is bright and successful but with little to no regard for
his patients – he mocks them, acts silly as he stands over their vulnerable
sleeping bodies, and shows no compassion for their pain or questions. His skills, he thinks, make him
unquestionable. He particularly dislikes a doctor who is his exact opposite –
always willing to listen, who even speaks to his patience when he is operating
on them. All of this changes when Jack is diagnosed with throat cancer and must
endure the humiliating process of becoming a patient himself, being spoken down
to, forced to wait, and ignored. Then he sees the log in his own eye. Then he
wants the surgeon he despised because he knows that guy actually will see him
as more than a tumor, more than a speck.
This morning I invite you to let Jesus take a look at your eyes or maybe
even one of Jesus’ residents who train underneath him. Know that he understands
your pain, wants to listen and treat you with dignity, wants to bring healing
sight to you. He sees the gorilla but knows you as more than a speck. Amen.
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