When God spoke to Abram in today’s first reading, Abram was 75 years old. Yet God sent Abram on a journey that lasted 100 years. Abram (who became Abraham) and God, through those 100 years and 14 chapters of Genesis, worked out the details of what a “personal relationship with God” looks like.
Not only did Abram’s progeny include the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and Jesus, they include us. The great story of salvation—of God reaching out to individual people to wrap them in his love—became a solid trail with markers in God’s relationship with Abram. Abram’s journey of faith with God gives us much guidance for our own journeys in the Church today.
Chapter One of the 2020 Directory for Catechesis begins: “All that the Church is, all that the Church does, finds its ultimate foundation in the fact that God, in his goodness and wisdom, wanted to reveal the mystery of his will by communicating himself to human beings.” (paragraph 11)
Abram’s Journey of Faith
From the time that God quit walking in the garden of Eden in the cool of the evening with Adam and Eve until Abram, God was a distant deity. Then God walked with Abram and began to reveal himself through personal relationship with people. The story begins today:
The LORD said to Abram:
“Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk
and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.
“I will make of you a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
and curse those who curse you.
All the communities of the earth
shall find blessing in you.”
It is interesting to look at Abram’s journeys on a map. Abram began journeying with his father, Terah, from Ur, a major city of the ancient world that was close to Babylon. Today it would be in Iraq. Terah’s family journeyed from Ur to Haran, a journey of about 600 miles. They traveled up the valley of the Euphrates River with large herds and flocks. From the beginning, the goal of their journey was Canaan. (Genesis 11:31)
Terah died in Haran. Then God spoke to Abram in today’s reading. The journey was about 500 additional miles from Haran to Canaan. The path was no longer pleasant river valley land. It included some desert and a lot of hill areas. It would have been a difficult journey. We will journey through the summer with Abram and his descendants.
And Abram began that journey at age 75. I am 72, and I have great respect for Abram’s faith to set out on such a journey, simply because God revealed himself and asked him to. (Later readings will reveal that Abram didn’t believe God would give him offspring until much later. Abram set out on faith.)
Journey in Today’s Gospel
Today’s Gospel continues the Sermon on the Mount, and it invites me to journey in faith. In this extended “homily of all homilies” Jesus began with the gentle message of the Beatitudes. As he nears completion now of this summary of his teaching, Jesus gets to some tough stuff. He says today:
“Stop judging, that you may not be judged.
For as you judge, so will you be judged,
and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother,
‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’
while the wooden beam is in your eye?
You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first;
then you will see clearly
to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”
Here Jesus takes all of us on another journey—the journey from morality based on black-and-white rules to morality based on both rules and context.
For most of us, that is a long, hard journey. It’s full of mountains of rules and deserts of contexts that create moral dilemmas.
When Jesus says here, “Stop judging,” does he mean that there are no objective rules for right and wrong? Does he mean relativism is a Christian way of seeing the world?
Our church teaches us: No.
It isn’t that there is no objective standard, but that the objective standard for judging is that we judge ourselves, not others. I’ve known that, but considerations from last week’s post on supernatural Generosity give me a new journey of faith to travel.
I admit, for me, it is hard to figure out exactly how objective moral truth integrates with not condemning (judging) those whose behavior does not match the objective moral norms I have been taught. To that concern, today I am reminded of a quip I have seen on Twitter: “Stop judging people who sin differently from you.”
That quip gives me pause. I have to admit, THAT’S the judging I do: I THINK I see clearly what looks like a big plank in another’s eye—a huge, obvious to me bad attitude or bad behavior.
But…when I am deeply honest, there is plenty of sin in me–the sin of judging as a case in point.
As I consider this Scripture today, it takes on a meaning I have not seen in it before: if I truly consider what the objective standards say, I can discern my own sins ARE BIG ENOUGH for me to see. Jesus’ words can turn them into big wooden planks. That discernment is my job. I have a gift of faith, as Abram did. When I look at the objective moral standards of our Catholic faith, ESPECIALLY IN THE CONTEXT OF MY PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD, that relationship I have with God gives me the courage to make a journey of faith to tackle my planks. That, too, is my job.
That said, if there is even a speck in my eye in real life, it hurts! If there is a speck in another’s eye—it would hurt them, too.
Today, with this Scripture, it seems Jesus is saying to me, the solution is not relativism, but applying God’s standards (all of them—you find them in Part III of the catechism, “Life in Christ”) to myself—using them to take the blindness and pain from myself, THEN, reaching out to HELP another with whatever speck is in his or her eye just now. The fault or sin in myself might be splinter size or giant size, but my loving relationship with God enables me to see it large enough to take it out. The fault or sin in others might be splinter size or giant size, but my loving relationship with God enables me to find a way to witness God’s desire for loving relationship with the other. Then, as that relationship develops, God can give that person the discernment and motivation to take out the sins in their own lives. I can’t repent of your sins, and you can’t repent of mine. We each must turn and face God for ourselves. He gives his love AND his standards to each and all of us. The standards are objective, but each person must travel his or her own journey of faith to match them.
Continuing from Last Week
Last week’s Scripture about Generosity—responding with Goodness when encountering evil and wrong—continues to work on me today. Through God’s generous vision of love, I have seen the beam in my eye about living with a generosity beyond forgiveness, a generosity that simply responds to evil with good to stop the transmission of evil. Understanding that is seeing a plank in MY eye. I’m working on what that means.
Our pastor says frequently, “The 18 inch journey from the head to the heart can be a very long journey.” Today, I am with Abram, though I am journeying the 18 inches from head to heart. God is taking out the beam to let me see–now I must move my heart to replace judgment with supernatural Generosity.
Prayer
Lord, You have me on this journey. It is an important one—filled with mountains of “I think I’m right” and deserts of “I think you’re wrong.” There are all the treacheries of relativism, secularism, lack of knowledge of what God’s standards are, and the subtle prides of humanism. There are also the pitfalls of “the way it used to be,” “the way it should be,” and “the way I want it to be.” But, Lord, You have given me the gift of relationship that reveals You in the context of love. Lead me, guide me, Lord.
