Father Peter F. Hansen
Sermon for the 4 th Sunday after Trinity
July 9, 2006
“ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?... Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye .”
Did you ever get a splinter in your hand? Maybe you didn't even feel it when it went in, but eventually it began to hurt. Deeper and deeper under your skin that little chip of wood traveled, until it hit a nerve and the pain told you it was there. And now you can't get it out so easily. You have to cut the skin to get it back out again.
Woodworking involves some hazards; among them is that tiny splinter. I've gotten splinters of redwood in my eyes and fingers. Redwood is particularly painful. It has an acid that eats your flesh, while it stains your skin black. It feels like acid in your eye, too. Wood chips are small things, almost nothing, but they can cause a lot of pain .
Wood chips have been plaguing mankind since the Garden of Eden, since we wandered over and began chomping on that one forbidden fruit from the forbidden fruit tree. Imagine how many splinters Noah had in his bare hands as he fashioned a boat 1-1/2 football fields long that took 100 years to build! The neighbors of Abraham fashioned idols out of wood, then covered them with gold and worshipped them. The wood for fire had to be cut, exposing ragged splinters to Abraham, as he bound his son Isaac on an altar upon Mount Moriah. Moses threw a tree into bitter waters of “Mara” to make it drinkable for the children of Israel. Hebrew craftsmen carved and labored over acacia wood from which they built the Ark of the Covenant, table of shewbread, altar of incense and the Tabernacle. Solomon arranged with Hiram, king of Tyre, to bring huge cedar trees from Lebanon for the timbered ceilings of God's Temple. Throughout many lives wood chips flew, and many a patient wife would labor with tweezers or a rolled up handkerchief at night to extract the offending splinters from the palm of her husband's hand.
Jesus was a worker in wood we presume, as His earthly stepfather, Joseph, was a carpenter. Our Lord understood wood, what you could do with it, how to work it. Born in a stable, he was laid in a wooden manger. He would be raised up above the heads of His people, nailed to a cross made of wood. He was the Branch, a new shoot from the felled trunk of Jesse, David's father, and He became the Vine into which we are grafted and from whom we draw our very life. Jesus was familiar with wood, and knew the wood chips that flew whenever a saw or plane or rasp was applied to wood.
He also knew that wood chips could blind you. Here He was, God on earth , and hardly anybody knew Him, none could truly see who He was. Those specially trained to learn of God and His promises should have recognized the fulfillment of their prophecies in Jesus, yet they rejected Him outright, blinded by preconceptions, fear and envy . There is blindness due to ignorance and blindness due to sin. One is easy to cure, the other…
“ Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?” He asked. He was thinking, no doubt, of the religious masters who taught endlessly about the Law and how to please God, and their students who followed rules and missed the experience of knowing God even as He passed them by in the street. How was it possible to follow God and yet fail to recognize Him? A disciple can only see what his master shows him, and so a blind master cannot teach much of what he sees.
Jesus remembered the wood chips of His father's carpenter shop, how they got in your eyes and stung, blinding you with tears. What if I asked you to take the splinter out of my eye, and you didn't even know you had a whole log in your eye? How good would you be at getting out my dust speck if your vision was blurred by such an obstacle?
What impedes your vision ? What exists in your lack of knowledge, your worldview, your understanding that sits in the middle of your eyesight and keeps you from seeing clearly? Do you know? Can you possibly see what is making you blind?
My eyesight has been a source of confidence for me from my youth. I could always see things clearly and I have been blessed with farsightedness. I can scout a trail; see a smoke plume miles away; recognize a road sign far enough ahead to get my car over in time. I used to be able to see close up , as well, without glasses. But in time, my close vision has become difficult and my eyes just won't focus clearly inside of about six feet. I've had to get reading glasses. I can still see smoke from a distant fire, but I need my glasses to read the newspaper story about it. There may be nothing I can do about my eyes except be humble and wear my glasses. If I'm too proud to wear them , however, I will be quite blind for detailed work within arms reach . The first problem can be corrected with lenses , the second, pride , can keep me blinded . It was this second problem Christ was concerned about rather than the first.
Do you see your world clearly, understand things as they are, and know right from wrong in every circumstance? Does anyone? Looking out from inside your head, is anything out of focus, is anyone blocked from your vision because of a blind spot, a wood chip, in your way?
Wood chips that block our view is prejudice . People stumble when suspicion and greed paint a whole distorted picture of the other guy in our minds, and our eyes won't correct that distortion unless we are humble enough to recognize our mistake . Men may be thus prejudiced against women, and women against men; adults against children, and children against their parents. My whole generation had such a distorted viewpoint of our parents' generation we brought the culture into chaos. Political outlooks can blind us to truth—from either side of the aisle, as can cynicism or class identities. There can be as much blind pride coming from the union worker toward his boss as there maybe from the corporate board member toward the janitor. People can be separated from one another through religion, social status, neighborhood and clan. When we can't clearly see the other person, we may be quick to diagnose his problem and its solution , as it seems clear enough to us in our blindness, with this big log in our eyes.
Thus, Jesus commanded, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” He wasn't saying that we should never use our understanding of God's truth to see right from wrong in a given situation, or even in another person. But we can be so hasty to dismiss another person with: “Oh, he's just a bum; a creep; a waste of time; a weirdo; a moron; a sinner; a member of the religious far right; a liberal; a clod.” Classifying somebody like that, and assuming the rest of the story, even God's final judgment against another , is itself a great sin, and may even be darker and more evil than anything the other person has done in God's sight. Wood chips that blind us to the humanity of another person keep us from finding in that face the image of God, lying hidden there, and from finding a friend.
St. Paul wrote to the Romans about what lies hidden inside of us. These funny faces conceal what shall be revealed in us eventually, glory untold. C.S. Lewis once wrote of when this flesh falls from our eternal souls, and we are revealed in the truth of who we are—saints or hell-bound hardened sinners—we will then be either such hideous monsters from which a sane person would simply run , or such luminous perfection and grace that one might be tempted to worship us . What shall be revealed is another story. What we see here and now is… well, wood chips . We mistake the sawdust for the masterpiece too much of the time.
And that goes for our view of ourselves as well. What do you see in the mirror of your mind? Can you see yourself clearly, close up? What glasses do you have to put on in order to see who you truly are—not just a guilty glimpse of unworthiness—we are all unworthy—but who God made you to be, and what you are doing about it, or against it. How clearly do you see yourself: well enough to pull the log out of your own eye?
Your pair of glasses in this case is the Holy Spirit, shaped by Scriptures, the Word of God for us. If you don't go to a Bible study, or read the Bible regularly, your glasses are dirty, or simply left in your pocket as you squint at blurry images before your weary eyes, trying to make out what you see, too proud to put wear glasses. Glasses can't make you see perfectly, as the optician can't make you see perfectly through these … We see through smoky glass and dirty mirrors even as Christians, but we're looking in the right direction, with a great deal of help, and more clearly than we did before.
Judge not . Don't assume you know who the other guy is. Seek help to see who you are . Get the log jam out of your own vision before you think you can help someone else see. That's the message . There is wood in our past, and the blindness we got from the fruit of one tree is, for now, a handicap. Another tree stood and held the dying form of our Savior, who by that death gave us life, and a true vision of the love of God. One more tree remains in our future that can heal our vision once and for all, the tree of life.
PFH+