Can a blind person guide a blind person?
Will not both fall into a pit?
Even as Christians enlightened by the Spirit in baptism it is not the case the we see with such immediate clarity as to walk without danger of falling into a pit or stepping in something unpleasant. The promise was not that we would attain immediate parity with our teacher, much less become superior to him. The promise was that a process of training would make us like our teacher. We were signing up for a life of purification in order to possess the purity of heart by which we hope to see God, and even "see him as he is" (see First John 3:2).
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?
Our process of growth goes better when we prioritize the wooden beam in our own eye rather than the splinter in our brother's eye. More often than not our opinions about our brother's behavior are just distractions, helping us to ignore the more pressing issues in ourselves. We ought not imagine that we can help our brother from as though condescending from some state of imagined superiority. If we take any pleasure in seeing the splinter in his eye we are obviously not the best candidate to help him. Yet this imagined moral superiority of ours is more often our motive for judging others than one of genuine concern. Only when the splinter in the eye of others hurts us as though it were in our own will we have the sympathetic concern necessary to be a genuine help to them.
The Pharisees demonstrated precisely the opposite of the teaching of Jesus. They were preeminently blind guides, morally corrupt, yet delighting to moralize from on high to others. There was no way out of this situation without a teacher to train them, teaching them to look first to their own hearts, and then only cautiously to others. But all of this would have required the humility to admit that they did not already see clearly, and it was this that they lacked.
Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains (see John 9:41).
We would be well advised to stop being so impressed with ourselves, so certain that we know exactly the prescription that would fix the world. When we realize our blind spots, that might even include wooden beams without our knowledge, we are able to trust or teacher more and ourselves less. We are able to submit ourselves to the training and purification that might one day make us genuinely useful to the others masses of the blind. Truly, the world needs us to do so, for so much harm comes as we blindly follow one another into pits, as our eyes gradually get worse and worse from our failure to address the irritants to our vision.
but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (see Matthew 6:23).
In contrast to the Pharisees was Paul. Paul had himself come through a process of purification, had been blinded, but regained his sight. He was able to be a genuine teacher after the fashion of the one true teacher, Jesus himself. He did not weaponize his message to feel superior, and it was, as he said, "no reason for me to boast". He was the very opposite of the Pharisees because he did not lord it over those to whom he preached.
Although I am free in regard to all,
I have made myself a slave to all
so as to win over as many as possible.
We can hear in Paul an attentiveness to the board that might ever be lurking in his own vision, and a constant concern to address it if it were found, for his own sake and that of his audience.
No, I drive my body and train it,
for fear that, after having preached to others,
I myself should be disqualified.
Paul never blackslid into smug presumption. He was able to proclaim the message clearly, to condemn immorality so starkly, because Jesus taught him the humility to look first at himself, the chief of sinners (see First Timothy 1:15). And so he was guided by the one who alone had perfect and limitless vision to be able to help with genuine sympathy those others who were sinners like himself, but still stumbling in spiritual blindness.
If we have a board in our eye obscuring our vision it is well advised that we do not seek to treat ourselves. Rather, realizing our own need, we should turn first to Jesus. This is part of the first lesson of the teacher for us, which is the depth of our own need for him. May his grace help us to realize this lesson today. As we do learn it we will mysteriously, perhaps not even realizing it ourselves, become genuinely equipped to help others as well.
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