Gospel according to Saint Luke 6:39-45:
Jesus told his disciples a parable,
“Can a blind person guide a blind person?
Will not both fall into a pit?
No disciple is superior to the teacher;
but when fully trained,
every disciple will be like his teacher.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?
How can you say to your brother,
‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’
when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?
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 tree does not bear rotten fruit,
nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.
For every tree is known by its own fruit.
For people do not pick figs from thornbushes,
nor do they gather grapes from brambles.
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.”
Do we have Pharisee genes?
Luis CASASUS President of the Idente Missionaries
Rome, March 02, 2025 | VIII Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sir 27: 4-7; 1Cor 15: 54-58; Lk 6: 39-45
There was a priest who, at daily mass, would contemplate a man who always passed in front of the church and stopped at the door, but never entered. After several days, the priest approached him and asked him why he didn’t come in. The man replied that the Church was full of hypocrites. The priest replied: That’s not true, there’s always room for one more!
Let this humorous anecdote serve to introduce a subject that Christ treats very seriously, addressing not the Pharisees, but all the disciples of that time and of today.
It is about hypocrisy. A superficial glance can lead us to think that, by being hypocritical, by judging others or trying to teach them what we do not live, we are hurting them.
But Christ goes further, saying that BOTH blind men, the one being guided and the one guiding, will fall into the pit.
No wonder Jesus takes this opportunity to tell us that He is the true Master, and that we are all disciples, that is to say, we are always learning. He is the one who has to free us from hypocrisy, from which none of us are totally immune and which essentially is a state of division; not by chance, it represents exactly the opposite of the objective of a spiritual life: a state of inner union and union with the Divine Persons.
The issue is so serious that Christ also uses humor, so that we can better digest his teachings: It is not without humor to imagine a man with a beam in his eye, trying to remove a straw from his friend’s eye.
We must understand what this instruction from Christ means: Do not judge. Of course, judging is something we do and must do every day, about our actions and the actions of others. Jesus is saying that we cannot allow any judgment to end in condemnation. So, leaving aside subtle linguistic issues, what he is telling us is that we should not condemn. He himself gives us a lesson with his attitude towards the adulterous woman (Jn 8:1-11), about whom he passed judgment and made a pronouncement, saying that she had sinned… and whom he did not want to condemn.
To judge means to form or have an opinion about something. In the legal sense, it means to pass sentence on something or someone. On the other hand, to condemn means to impose some kind of eternal divine punishment on someone or something. In a judicial sense, it means to declare someone guilty of a crime.
Even if we do not condemn, we often judge excessively, with too much confidence in our judgments and opinions, which we throw at others dogmatically, seeking to impose ourselves or simply to devalue their ideas. For example, we speak with little compassion of other people, we express as indisputable our opinion on vaccines, climate change, politics, liturgy or the psychology of Neanderthals.
At other times, in matters of the spiritual life, we confuse our opinions and conclusions with divine thoughts. We are not aware that we are disciples, surely unfaithful at many moments. But this already belongs to the attachment to our judgments.
Of course, you and I condemn in many ways, making determinations and unconsciously seeking to feel superior to others, even to those we claim to love. How much easier it is to judge those who hurt me! That is what last Sunday’s Gospel text was about.
Today, Christ invites us to go even deeper: Acting with love requires thinking with love beforehand. That explains why he ends his teaching today by saying: out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Thinking with love means more than reflection; it also implies an intimate embrace of the person who has acted incorrectly, or even cruelly and obstinately.
Let us not forget that our founding father, in giving us the Examination of Conscience as a guide for our ascetic efforts, tells us, above all, to make sure that our prayer is lived in a continuous way, beginning with an attention to the things of the kingdom of heaven, to what unites us to God. If we do this, and only then, will we be capable of living an ever more complete charity.
—ooOoo—
Of course we must judge on many occasions. But above all we must judge ourselves, to know our capacity and our limits and thus be better prepared to correct and teach… if that is our role.
Let’s remember what happened to a good woman who said to her friend: Look how unkempt and scruffy the woman across the street is, you should see how dirty the children are and how untidy her house is! She’s a disgrace to the whole neighborhood. Look at the clothes she has hanging out to dry and look at the black stains on those towels and those sheets…
The friend went to the window, looked outside and said: I think those clothes are perfectly clean, it’s your windows that have stains.
Knowing oneself, seeing the beam in our own eye, is important, but it is not possible by our own efforts because, as the saying goes, the eye cannot see itself. We can do it through a mirror, but we will only see a reflection of what our eye really is.
The Koran also states that it is not that the eyes are blind, but that the blind are the hearts locked in the chest. At other times we say that a knife may be sharp, but it cannot cut itself. It is a universal intuition.
The only way to know myself is to contemplate what the Spirit has carefully deposited in my heart, that essential impulse that pushes me to go out of myself and unite with my neighbor. Everything else is superficial, in the same way that an orange is not all like the peel we see on the outside.
Jesus’ advice about removing the beam from my eye is not a simple accusation, nor is it meant to humiliate me. It is not the end of the story. He ends by saying that, once that beam has been removed, I will be able to remove the straw in my neighbor’s eye, which may be small, but makes his life considerably more difficult.
Let us bear in mind what Saint Paul tells us in the Second Reading, which might seem disconnected from today’s Gospel text. He encourages us not to be dazzled by the good and bad of our earthly body, by our defects and virtues. Our true identity will be fully revealed after this pilgrimage through this world, knowing that our labors will not be without reward. Rather than referring to the many tasks that all human beings must carry out and that make us continually focus on the world and its concerns, the hardships he mentions are those we face because of being obedient to the divine will.
St. Bernard tells us that if you have eyes for the shortcomings of your neighbor and not for your own, no feeling of mercy will arise in you, but rather indignation. You will be more willing to judge than to help, to crush with the spirit of anger than to instruct with the spirit of gentleness.
—ooOoo—
One last observation. Being a hypocrite is not just an attitude to preserve a good reputation in front of others. It is also a trap set by and for each one of us, to make us feel comfortable living according to God and the world at the same time. Mission impossible, of course. In this way, not only is confusion created in those who see the hypocritical behavior, but also a state of intimate bitterness and true rejection of God: So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I will spit you out of my mouth(Rev 3:16).
A lukewarm person is someone who, frightened by the difficulty they feel on the path of virtue and giving in to temptation, once the initial fervor of the spirit has passed, deliberately decides to move on to a comfortable and free life, without inconvenience, content with a certain external appearance, with a horror of any progress in virtue. Sometimes they have an apparent calmness of soul due to the fact that they do not feel many temptations and agitations.
By its very nature, lukewarmness is often related to acedia or sloth, a cardinal vice that the ancient monks identified with the “devil of the midday” that attacks when years of walking in the spiritual life have passed. It resembles what today is called the “midlife crisis”.
The lukewarm person lives the spiritual life, but their life has something superficial, fictitious, lacking in real embodiment about it. There is a practical renunciation of total sanctity, although they may continue to talk about it.
This is often accompanied by a certain sense of personal complacency, a kind of self-persuasion that they are being sensible, which paralyzes their spiritual progress for years on end. There are moments of inner drive; but then they tire and come to a standstill again. The result is that they do not progress in the spiritual life. This same relative effort serves as a justification (I’m trying…) and further persuades them of their wisdom.
This state is also favored by the fact that mediocre people tend to maintain attitudes of kindness, piety and delicacy in their dealings with others. Even so, the mediocre person maintains and encourages specific vices, such as vanity, gluttony, touchiness, curiosity and hypersensitivity. They work in this area, but their effort is minimal and is reduced to not sinning, curbing these tendencies when they reach the point of deliberate sin. At other times they positively encourage them with apparently sensible justifications.
What leads to this state of mediocrity? A rejection of self-denial and the weakening of authentic prayer.
The problem with spiritual lukewarmness or mediocrity, perhaps, is that none of us consider ourselves mediocre or lukewarm, because even if we declare to others that we live in that state, we do so hypocritically.
The monk Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), born in Pontus, part of present-day Turkey, describes the demon of acedia with surprising finesse, with effects that undoubtedly remind us of people who have abandoned or are about to abandon their vocation.
He claims that it is the most tiresome of demons. It assails the monk in the middle of the day – hence its name of demon of midday – filling the recluse with restlessness and tedium. It inspires in him aversion to the place where he lives, to his very state of life, to manual labor. It makes him think that his brothers have no charity, that no one is capable of consoling him, and, as a consequence, makes him long for other places where life is surely more bearable and where he could exercise a less painful profession. It reminds him of his relatives, of his previous existence. It reminds him of how long life is and how painful the hardships of asceticism are. In short, it does everything possible to make the monk ‘abandon his cell and flee the state’.
We conclude by proposing that we meditate on this capsule from our founding father:
Hypocrisy is the Trojan horse of vices.
_______________________________
In the Sacred Hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph,
Luis CASASUS
President
