May 18

A Self-Righteous Spirit

How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye? — Matt 7:4 BSB

But isn’t it an act of kindness to help a friend by removing the speck from their eye? If we saw a neighbor with something irritating their eye, wouldn’t it be a brotherly thing to help them? So, why isn’t it just as kind to help a friend correct a fault, even if we share the same fault? If we did it with the right spirit, it would be a kindness. We are called to seek the well-being of others in every possible way. Therefore, if we see something that mars their beauty or character, we should want to help them overcome it.

But the problem is that we often don’t look at our neighbor’s faults with love and sympathy. To begin with, we don’t admit that we have beams in our own eyes, or even that we have any faults at all. It’s this self-righteous attitude that Jesus condemns. A person may be horrified by a tiny flaw they see in their neighbor’s character, but that same neighbor, looking back, sees an exaggerated version of the same flaw in them. Will the neighbor benefit from such a rebuke?

Imagine a person with a bad temper lecturing us on the sin of anger, or a dishonest person pointing out our lack of integrity, or a liar reprimanding us for falsehood, or a rude person criticizing us for a lack of courtesy, or a hypocrite calling us insincere. Would such a lecture do us any good, even if we are aware of the fault they are addressing? No, it would only irritate us. We wonder how people can have the nerve to talk about the specks in our eyes when they have beams in their own. Clearly, this is not the way to help others with their faults.