Gospel Reading: Matthew 7: 1-5 (The splinter in my brother’s eye; the wooden beam in mine)
We all want to be known for our goodness. To have others
judge our actions good,
value our good character,
praise our good self.
Often, when we experience this, we celebrate the goodness of our being human.
But we are sometimes less than human in our interactions with others.
When we judge another unworthy, we deny his personhood.
When we judge another’s actions to be suspect, we reject her goodness.
When we judge others for their faults, failings and sins, we condemn them as inhuman.
Today’s Gospel reading is traditionally understood to be about hypocrisy.
About how we judge others for their sins, when we ourselves are sinners.
Jesus calls his disciples and us
to stop seeing the splinters in another’s eye
while forgetting the wooden beams in ours.
I’d like to think that Jesus calls us to do this
so that we can more clearly see,
more honestly appreciate,
that the other whom we judge is as good as we are in our sinfulness.
Perhaps, what Jesus also calls us to today
is to more honestly appreciate the sum of all our parts, that is,
the humanness of my brothers and sisters and the humanness of myself.
When we look at another and judge him bad, deviant, other,
we fixate ourselves on individual moments
of difference, of contradiction, of dismay, of disappointment.
What Jesus calls us to in today’s Gospel reading
is to remember that each of us is a complex mix
of good and bad,
of words that inspire another and mouths that put down one we dislike,
of hearts that uplift another and hands that tear down the other’s dignity.
And this is the ironic beauty of who you and I really are.
This is the same beauty God sees in us.
Jesus teaches us that God does see the flawed, the weak and the sinful selves that we are.
But God also sees the goodness, the kindness and the graciousness that we are too.
More significantly, God sees the hopeful promise in each of us to become better.
This is the glint in our humanity that seizes God’s gaze.
What God sees in this is the human potential to transcend our lesser selves.
That Jesus reaches out
to save the adulterous woman,
to include Matthew the tax collector among his disciples,
to forgive Peter for his betrayal
speaks of God’s enchantment with humankind.
God’s enchantment is rooted in God’s faith in human goodness
and in the human capacity to realize this goodness
both in our lives and in the lives of others.
And so, we might want to reflect today
not only on Jesus' call to each one of us to stop being the hypocrite
but also on the saving grace
that we can challenge another when we are prepared to appreciate
that who my brother and sister are
is nothing less than the totality of their being fully human,
that tapestry of lights and shadows,
so exquisite, so human, and so much the human life
God has chosen as God’s beloved own.
This is a homily I preached at our weekday Mass in Xavier Jesuit Community on 20 June 2011.
photo: looking by adsj (paris, july 2009)
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