July 10, 2011
Luke 6.41-42
Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, with never a thought for the great plank in your own? How can you say to your brother, "My dear brother, let me take the speck out of your eye," when you are blind to the plank in your own? You hypocrite! First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother's.
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4 comments:
Something we're bound to observe frequently around us, not so frequently in us.
But in its time, this seems to be yet another dig at the Pharisees and their practice of scrutinising the minutia of the law. Jesus is, after all, striving to restore Israel, just as the Pharisees and the various zealot groups are striving in their own ways, on their own particular levels. He sees their approaches... as things that have been tried in the past, as with the Maccabees, that did not restore Israel's connection to YHWY, and thus led nowhere.
The plank-in-the-eye, in this context, might be the seemingly endless series of ways people still find, of trying to serve God in every way except knowing God.
In that light, the metaphor of 'seeing' is the same as in 6.39 (and I saw it not!)
“.. plank-in-the-eye .. trying to serve God in every way except knowing God.”
Very nice.
Just watched The Merchant of Venice (Irons/Pacino). Quaker-like in many ways – stopping short of violence - the pound of flesh. The reasoning – legal reasoning – at the end is quite brilliant. This version reduces the anti-Semitism. Everyone gets razored. Christian slave owners. Christians in Venice whore-houses. Me, the legalist - law-beam in tow. Even the exactitude of scientific measurement (with scales in hand as another beam-in-eye to weigh the pound of flesh).
Everyone in that play has a beam – everyone – needs ...
“The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
In the meantime, Jesus cleanses that temple and mine – of many beams ...
Re. Eliade – maybe not worth a read – unless you find a specific title that lights-up. He generously cites other studies – many of which are dated and revised. An Eastern Orthodox bent toward the visual – his hierophany – is weighted toward sightings of God, quite broad spectrum. If ever you have time to spare in a big academic library, browse his editorial oversight in the academic Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vols) – encyclopedism (not a single volume) is what his universalist iconography produced. Thanks for Stephen Gaskin!
.. p.s., on Merchant of Venice, I find myself needing to watch it two or three times, pausing, taking in the words ... it does not have sub-titles ... but the work is more than re-paid, much more ... take a Quaker approach of slow, meditational pauses on each phrase ... awesome, really ...
I see you taking up the sword of the law... to defend the weak... & then your mind's hand grows to fit that sword: "I can litigate this one; that one won't fly past a judge."
There are no "rights" if you don't have a lawyer! And for many people, you're it, a much-needed blessing!
I used to work for the Social Security Administration; you have to be too bright for the job to work there in the first place, but once you do there's a specific mental disability people need to keep on working there, ie One's mind starts working like that shelf-full of manuals they give you. Twisted like a legislator's. All the carefully-reasoned rationales that go into trying to make an unfair, psychotic mechanism as fair and 'sane' as possible, aside from the gibbering madness of the society that produced it. Man, when I quit I danced all the way out of the office!!!
But if the law gig is your karma, God bless you!
Phew!!! The places a few lines of scripture, especially Jesus', can take one!
There was a movie of Hamlet, I forget whose, that hit me like your Merchant. Every line about times out of joint felt like it had been written yesterday, about the world we live in!
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