Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton

Splinters

So, a parent confronts his or her teenage son about not studying for a test or skipping a homework assignment.

A manager calls a young sales rep into his office for messing up the order of one of the company’s oldest and best customers.

A friend works up the nerve to tell her friend that what she did hurt and embarrassed her.

A neighbor expresses his discomfort to the man who lives next door about some negative ethnic stereotyping.

No one likes these encounters. But the parent, the manager, the friend, and the neighbor remain calm.

They are firm and focused, but they are also calm and compassionate. They call their son, their employee, their friend, their neighbor to be aware of their actions.

They help them to become aware of what they have done as a way to do better or be better. What could be an ugly and divisive confrontation becomes something positive.

Wooden Beams

Why?

How can these encounters turn out positively? I think there is only one way this happens.

Because Mom and Dad remember what it was like to be young themselves. Because the manager remembers messing up more than one order when he was starting out.

Because the hurt friend remembers times when she unwittingly hurt someone who was close to her. Because the neighbor remembers that he was also brought up with some negative ethnic stereotypes.

To use Jesus’ image today, these persons had worked to remove the wooden beams from their own eyes first. Only then are they able to help others to pull the splinters out of their eyes.

Jesus’ Lesson

So, in today’s gospel, Jesus is not saying that we should ignore the faults of others.

He is not saying that we should quietly accept the bad behavior of others because we’re no better than they are. He is saying that challenging the hurtful behavior of another begins with the humility of seeing the wooden beams in our own eyes first.

It begins with understanding how those wooden beams distort our own vision and behavior. To put it another way, we will not effectively deal with another person’s brokenness until we admit our own brokenness.

We cannot heal another person until we have known our own need for healing. This is what Jesus means when he cautions us to deal with the wooden beam in our own eye first before we try to take out the splinter in the eye of another.