Jesus told his disciples, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye. A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Luke 6.41-42,45)
In 2015, David Brooks, the newspaper columnist, wrote a book entitled The Road to Character, a book, he said, he wrote to save his own soul. Using a number of life sketches of men and women who overcame personal faults to become people of character, he explained, “We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation.”
Later, he provides concrete examples, stating, “We often put our loves out of order. If someone tells you something in confidence and then you blab it as good gossip at a dinner party, you are putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. If you talk more at a meeting than you listen, you may be putting your ardor to outshine above learning.”
In many ways, conscious or unconscious, Brooks is drawing from Saint Augustine, a philosopher and theologian, who already in the 5th century said that what defines a person more than anything is what they love. When we ask about a good person, we are not talking about what they believe or what they hope for, but what they love. Sin, for Augustine, is disordered loves. When we sin, the things we love are out of order.
Of course, it is clear soon enough that both writers, Augustine and Brooks, owe their insight to the Jewish Rabbi called Jesus of Nazareth who stated, “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil.” Put another way, a good person loves good things while a bad person loves bad things, each one loving different things.
In the passage that we hear today, Rabbi Jesus concludes his Sermon on the Plain, addressing here the matter of character, that interior disposition that directs a person either towards good or towards evil based on the loves that a person has acquired over a lifetime, putting him or her on one path or another, determining who, in the end, that person has become. Our actions, in short, are an outward expression of our inward being, a being defined by the things that we love.
A pithier way of saying the same thing was suggested years ago by someone who put it simply–if you want to know what you love, look at your checkbook. His point is clear. How we spend our money shows the things we value, our expenditures a sign of our values. It may be a simplistic statement, but it still carries more truth than we may want to face.
At the same time that Rabbi Jesus says “from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks,” he also lampoons those he calls hypocrites, the people who try to camouflage the inner workings of their heart, their actions hollow and shallow because they are not truly reflective of the heart, but indicative of superficiality.
Using an intentional exaggeration to make his point clear to his listeners, he asks, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?” In some translations, the word sawdust is substituted for splinter, emphasizing the smallness of the misdeed we see in the other person when compared to the bigness of the misdeed in our own lives that we intentionally fail to see, its size symbolized by a wooden plank, impossible to miss.
If anything fired up the Galilean Rabbi, it was hypocrisy, the hypocrite being the person who sees the sawdust in another person’s eye while not seeing the plank in his own eye. For Rabbi Jesus, the personification of hypocrisy was found in the Pharisees who regularly found fault with him or with his followers, pointing out their failures, but failing to see their own failures. He often referred to them as blind guides. In the Sermon on the Plain he speaks of them as “a blind person guiding a blind person.”
Unfortunately, while the Pharisees in Rabbi Jesus’s time may have excelled at hypocrisy, they did not have a patent on it. The proof is found in our own age where it has reached heights that make the Pharisees’s hypocrisy look like child’s play or amateur hour. One psychological study showed that the persona people show in public aligns with what they really are like only about 50 percent of the time on the average. In other words, half the time we’re faking it or misrepresenting ourselves. We’ve become performance artists, putting on a show for others.
Occasionally, one hears or sees a person who doesn’t fake it for his fans. When Joseph Cardinal Bernandin died, an old friend of his, Rabbi Herman Schaalman, said of Bernardin, “He was inside with his outside, outside with his inside, which is rare.” In making the statement, Schaalman told two truths, the first about Bernardin, the second about the rarity of such authenticity.
A woman remembers the time when a doctor came to her high school to talk to the students about the dangers of smoking. As she recalled, he scared them with his grim pictures of smokers’ lungs and tales of death from lung cancer. He finished his speech by saying, “Remember, fire on one end, fool on the other.” She said they were all impressed–until a couple of students happened to see the doctor light up a cigarette when he got back in his car after the lecture.
As she said, “His credibility was shot. He was the talk of the campus. It would have been better for the no-smoking campaign if he had never come to speak. Saying one thing and doing another is something nobody respects.” The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once said something very similar, except in a different context. He offered this thought, “The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim God with their mouths and deny him with their lifestyles are what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable.”
Of course, it is easy enough to find many such examples of blatant hypocrisy, no challenge, really, in our times. A more difficult task, and the one that Rabbi Jesus assigns us today, is to find the hypocrisy in ourselves, those many instances where we judge others for the faults that we ourselves commit. As one commentator pointed out in regard to this passage, “The person who assumes that Jesus is directing his comments to some other person is, in fact, the person most in need of hearing Jesus’s warning.”
So that is where we are today–face to face with our own flaws, our own faults, our own failures. Now, the eyes must turn inward, not outward, seeing the truth of our character, who we really are deep down within ourselves. Not the self we present to the outer world, but our true character, without make-up, not photoshopped, no mouthwash.
And, with an honest to goodness look at our true character, we begin with the things we love, because, in the end, our loves are revelatory of our character more than anything else. What are the things we love? Do we love being part of the popular crowd more than we love standing up for unjust policies? Do we love the extra clothes in our closet more than we love the poor person who spends winter nights on a bench without a coat? Do we love our politics more than we love our religion, a religion that decries injustice, inhospitality, inhumaneness in all shapes and forms? In what exact order are our loves?
These are very tough questions that require confrontation, not with the enemy outside ourselves, but with the enemy inside ourselves, that enemy that tells us to think only of ourselves, that persuades us to turn away from others in need and to satisfy our own needs, that urges us see others as lost causes rather than seeing all others as children of the same God we worship. Do we see others as evil while we see ourselves as truly good?
Again, we are reminded of something that David Brooks said in his book. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, not between political parties either–but right through every human heart.” It is a statement that the Galilean Teacher understood very well, his understanding of the human heart second to none. “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit,” he says today, a good way of determining if we have our loves in order–the fruit of our lives.
It is our heart that tells the real story of who we are, not our mouths. And it is our heart that Rabbi Jesus wants, not our lips. He saw all the lip service he could stomach with the Pharisees. As one seasoned spiritual writer once said, “If our decision for Jesus makes no difference in how we live Monday through Saturday, then all our liturgies and prayers are a hollow mockery.”
Again, it boils down to the things we love. What is the order? Do we have them in the right order? Today, Rabbi Jesus leaves no question about his intentions. If we are to follow him, then we must be willing to reform our hearts, which means reforming our loves. He asks us to love his way more than we love the way of the world, which will require us to bend our lives to imitate his life.
It is no easy task. The pull of gravity would have us stay in the world, not soar to the heavens. So, if we follow him, it will be a continual pull against the forces that would hold us down, hold us back, hold us off. To follow him is a step at a time, sometimes small steps being all we can manage. But if we continue with our steps, one day we will see, much to our surprise, that we have put the loves of our hearts in the same order as those in his heart. And then, only then, can we call ourselves his followers.
–Jeremy Myers
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