Jesus’ message about the one with the log in his eye trying to help the one with the speck in his eye isn’t just about measuring different sized irritants in our eyes or different sized sins in our hearts. Its message isn’t simply, “Be sure to rebuke only those who are less godly than you are.” Rather it reminds us of the importance of giving our attention to our own weaknesses before we worry about the supposed weaknesses we see in others.
CS Lewis made a similar point in his Screwtape Letters. Therein he had Screwtape, the senior demon encourage Wormwood, the junior demon to encourage his “patient” to cultivate an amorphous and powerless love for distant abstractions while disdaining a love for his annoying neighbor in the pew beside him. We do the same with sin. We find it so much easier to raise up our moral outrage against people and sins that are far from us. It’s a rather handy distraction from ourselves and the sins that are in us. Angry Greta can hate with the heat of a thousand suns those nameless capitalists that are fiddling while Gaia burns, and in so doing pay no attention to the large sinner footprint she is laying down on her way to eternal warming. Shame on her.
We should not be surprised when unbelievers do this. But aiming close, we find we have much the same problem. I too find it easy to rage against the sins of people I’ve never met, and in so doing construct a delusion that they are worse than I am. The good news, on the other hand, is that there is so much more I can do about my own sins and failures than I can do about geo-politics in Hong Kong, or internal intrigue in the Kremlin, however brutal things may be. Whether it is a log or a splinter, by looking into that mirror which is the Word of God, I can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, take it out. Not so I can then give my attention to the sins of others, but that I can turn my attention to the other sins of mine. There isn’t one mere speck, nor one mere log in there. There’s enough stacked wood for a New England winter in my eye.
When you and I determine to debate over the relative merits of him, whomever he may be, whichever side I may take, we have both taken ourselves out of the one arena where we can do the most good- worrying about our own sins. Yes, of course there’s a time and a place to warn of wolves, to mark the divisive man. That time, however, isn’t in the midst of our battle with our own wolves, nor when we are being the divisive man. Let us pick up the prophet’s mantle, and prophesy against our own failures. And God will have mercy.