Jesus knew of what He spoke when He warned us to look out for the beam in our own eyes before getting too concerned about the speck in the eye of our brother. Our problem, having been forewarned by Jesus, is that we seek, through the diabolical art of simultaneous translation, to shrink this warning down to size. That is, we escape the far reaching implications of this command by turning it into a mere warning against hypocrisy. We fail to meet this standard, we seem to reason, only in those instances wherein the mote and the speck are of exactly the same genus, species and phylum. We think Jesus is telling us only that we should not remove the speck of sin a in our neighbor if we are more guilty of a more egregious form of sin A. Certainly a failure here carries with it a special flavor of hypocrisy that must be sweet to the lips of the serpent. But we ought to realize that the issue is the relative size of the sins, not the relative ontological closeness of the sins.
If my friend, for instance, misused his computer as is the manner of too many men, and I, on the other hand, availed myself of the services of “working women” I would certainly run afoul of this warning if I got in his face about the computer. The same is true, however, if my friend is a touch stingy, and I confront him on it while I am up to my eyeballs in the fear of men. The warning hits home corporately if his tradition has not sufficiently entered into the necessary implications of the sovereignty of God, and my tradition is given to profound intellectual pride. Truth be told, my tradition is given to profound intellectual pride. All those who are persuaded that their minds are the cat’s meow will, at least for a time, visit the world of the Reformed. And they will feel right at home. There together we will use our great intellects to catalog the theological errors of our neighbors. We will look down our noses at the poor benighted fools who use canned and inaccurate spiels to bring in the lost, while we do nothing to bring in the lost. We will show our impiety by mocking the Gnostic tinged piety of those with tender consciences in our midst, while our robust consciences throw genuine guilt off like so much dandruff.
We will focus more clearly on the sin in our own lives, those beams that so blind us, as we seek to better tend our own gardens. We will do that when we begin all our intellectual exercises, even all our spiritual exercises by asking this question first- where is my sin in all this? Here, though, is the glorious promise. The upside down economy of the Lord Jesus applies here as well. That is, even as we must be last to be first, we must die to live, so we must turn inward, looking to our own sins and our own weaknesses if we really want to change the world. Removing beams in our own eyes will have far greater global impact than going in a speck hunt in the eyes of our neighbors. I want to change the world. It must, however, begin with me.