Homily for the 8th Sunday of Ordinary Time (C)
I have to admit that the opening of today’s first reading, “When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear; so do one’s faults when one speaks,” is not the most encouraging thing to read when one has to give a homily. Both the words of Sirach and Jesus’ sayings in the Gospel of Luke deal with what is inside a person and what becomes visible to others, what we see and what we don’t. The first reading is a warning about putting too much faith in outward appearances. Someone might have all the right credentials, but little wisdom; someone might repeat all the fashionable phrases, but say nothing of substance.
The test that Sirach proposes to separate the trustworthy from the slick shyster is tribulation. “As the test of what the potter molds is in the furnace, so in tribulation is the test of the just.” It is easy to follow Jesus when he tells us what we want to hear, less so when we might lose friends because of what he says. Fidelity doesn’t mean much when it comes without a cost. Imagine marriage vows modified to promise faithfulness “in good times but not bad, in health but not sickness, wherever I find my bliss.” It’s only when the going gets tough that faith, hope, and love show their worth.
Jesus adds another criterion for distinguishing the enduring truth from the well-dressed lie: you shall know the tree by its fruit. You may have heard people say, “It’s really what’s inside that counts.” Jesus pours a bit of cold water on such sentimentalism. If what’s inside produces thorns, then it can’t really be all that good. Again and again in different ways Jesus calls for the unity of what is inside with what is outside, opposing any division between interior and exterior religion—challenging us to confess his name with both our words and our deeds.
Jesus again and again challenges us to purity of heart, which means purity all the way through—in our thoughts and in our words, in what we do, and what we chose not to do. In the Beatitudes, Jesus promises that the pure in heart will see God. Sight, interestingly, is also at the center of today’s Gospel reading. The blind lead the blind into a pit, and we notice the splinter in our brother’s eye but not the beam in our own. But that image showing the absurdity of hypocrisy also comes with an instruction and a promise: “Remove the wooden beam… then you will see clearly.”
The parable is a warning against judging others with a standard that is harsher than that with which we judge ourselves, but it’s something more than that. It’s an invitation to see clearly, truthfully—just as the other images from today’s readings are invitations to discern the truth beyond superficial appearances and empty rhetoric.
Having a beam in one’s eye means, among other things, having seriously obscured vision. We certainly would not want the ophthalmologist to walk into the room about to perform eye surgery on us if she herself couldn’t see straight. Read especially in the context of the other readings, the parable is not a command to go through life with eyes closed, not making any judgments at all, naively hoping for the best, or pretending as if moral distinctions don’t exist or don’t matter. Instead, it is a command to make the effort to purify our vision, to see the world with greater objectivity and greater truthfulness. This means trying to align our vision with God’s vision. A prayer I find helpful and recommend, especially in those moments of tribulation, is to ask the Lord, “How do you see the situation?” To ask him to see whatever difficulty we are facing with his eyes.
Perhaps even more important—because most of our difficult situations involve difficult people—is to ask him, “How do you see this other person?” Because we may see another person as an obstacle, but God, who has shed his blood on the cross for our neighbor, probably sees him in a rather different light. The problem in today’s parable, it seems to me, is not that the beam causes us to see the splinter inaccurately. The Lord’s final words suggest that there really is a splinter in our brother’s eye and that surgery to remove it in the end is necessary. But perhaps the problem is not that we are seeing the splinter too well, but that we are not seeing our brother well enough.
I have been thinking recently about what it means for a Christian to see rightly because I have just finished reading a book called Chastity by one of today’s best spiritual writers, the Norwegian bishop Erik Varden, and it contains a wonderful section on seeing. What Bishop Varden writes about chastity as something that applies to all Christians: “The beginning of living chastely in the world is to see it as it is, with reverence, desiring to encounter what I see, but freed from the need to possess.”
When thinking about seeing the world chastely today, one of the first problems that comes to mind—to anyone who has heard of the internet—is the prevalence of pornography. And one of the things that strikes me reflecting on Bishop Varden’s book is that pornography involves not just explicit images, but a way of seeing that reduces other people to objects, that sees a collection of body parts but not persons. I’m not the first to observe that the problem with pornography is not that we see too much, but that we see too little. What we see is artificial, not a real person but a fantasy, designed to make us forget that the person we are seeing is a daughter or a son, a child of God, our brother or our sister. Bishop Varden writes, “To see truly is to be changed by what I see. It is important to remember this in a climate inducing me to think that reality ought to adapt itself to me, not I to it.” Seeing what is true is what chastity means and what today’s readings, in different ways, encourage us to do.
The beams that end up in our eyes usually take the form of some kind of selfishness or, at least, self-centeredness. Seeing truly means seeing beyond ourselves. It means seeing both shadow and light—not ignoring the thorns or splinters in the world or being taken in by illusion. Instead, it means seeing more: seeing that a splinter is just that—a splinter—but the person stumbling with the eye wound next to me is my brother.
Readings: Sirach 27:4-7; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45
March 2, 2025
Oratorio San Francesco Saverio del Caravita
Rome
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 