Yesterday’s
Gospel reading for the 4th Sunday after Trinity was Luke 6:
36-41. It contains the wonderful message
of Jesus:
Why
do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the
log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour,
“Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye”, when
you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the
log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of
your neighbour’s eye.
In the
Anglican churches in the neighbouring communities here in P.E.I. that Lorna and
I attend they use the King James Version.
The KJV uses “mote” rather than “speck”.
As with much of the KJV language mote is more poetic but I must admit
that the NRSV version of speck is more descriptive and makes the point more expressively. It is hard to imagine a log or beam in your
eye that you can’t see. However, Jesus
tells us that we can concentrate on the speck in another’s eye and ignore or be
ignorant of the log in our own.
One of the
points my sermon addresses is Jesus’s command to be perfect. He states the Gospel passage, “everyone
that is perfect shall be as his master.”
Jesus states this command more clearly in Matthew chapter 5:48, “Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I have problems with the idea that we are
called by Jesus to be perfect. This, in
my mind, is a barrier to the idea of seeing the log in your own eye rather than
the speck in your neighbour’s eye.
Jesus’s invocation about not seeing the log in your own
eye and focussing on the log in another’s expresses a very important concept in
modern psychological. What Jesus is
describing has been identified as projection. You see in others what is
actually within you. Often people will
react strongly—actually overreact to another person or what that person
does. In doing so they are responding to
something that is a characteristic that they are not conscious of within themselves
which they do not find acceptable. Carl
Jung has named this as the Shadow archetype.
In effect the command by Jesus to be perfect will support
the resistance that people have to acknowledging those parts of themselves
which they consider do not measure up to their idea of what perfection is. Therefore the Christian idea of perfection
and the possibility of achieving that ideal can be a barrier to
what is is proclaimed.
As I note in my sermon another way of understanding
what Jesus desires for us is based on a different translation of the word ‘perfection’
in the Aramaic which is understood by scholars to be Jesus’s native
language. Neil Douglas-Klotz, in his
book A
Prayer for the Cosmos translates the word as “all embracing”. This is an important understanding when considering
the Shadow and projection. If we do not
accept i.e. embrace those parts of ourselves that we do not find acceptable we
will never fully understand the person that God created us to be. We will continue to see the speck in another person’s
eye rather than the log in our own eye.
The next time that you
react overly strongly i.e. overreact to someone I invite you to consider that
it may a part of yourself that you are actually reacting to. The aphorism to ‘know thyself’ is not
biblical but it is applicable and valuable.
Peace
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