Take The Beam Out First

There is a kind of Catholic who can spot a liturgical abuse from the back pew, name the heresy in a homily before the priest finishes the sentence, and tell you exactly what is wrong with the bishop, the parish council, and the family in the next car at pickup. He is often right. And Jesus calls him a hypocrite anyway, because a man who can see a splinter at forty feet and cannot see the beam hanging out of his own face is blind, whatever his eyesight. Today’s readings put two men side by side who understood that. Paul, who preached to half the Mediterranean and still feared being disqualified himself (1 Corinthians 9:27). And Saint Cyprian of Carthage, today’s saint, who wrote a treatise on patience in the middle of a fight because he could feel his own temper getting the better of him. The question for us is uncomfortable and simple: when I correct someone, have I dealt with myself first?

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22b-27

For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my preaching I may make the gospel free of charge, not making full use of my right in the gospel.

For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more.

To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

Gospel: Luke 6:39-42

He also told them a parable: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul has spent most of 1 Corinthians 9 proving something he then refuses to use. He has every right to be supported by the Corinthians: the soldier draws pay, the farmer eats from his vineyard, the Law says not to muzzle the ox, the priests eat from the altar, and the Lord himself commanded that “those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:7-14). Then, with an emphatic “I” that breaks the pattern, he throws it all away: “I have made no use of any of these rights” (1 Corinthians 9:15). The whole point of arguing so hard for his rights was to make the renunciation of them land harder.^[1]

“Necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16). The Greek word is anankē, constraint, the kind of compulsion a slave lives under. Paul is describing himself as a slave of Christ, and the language of the next verses is slave language all the way down: a task imposed, no free will in the matter, and oikonomia, the household management that a master entrusted to a trusted slave (1 Corinthians 9:17; compare 4:1-2). That “woe” is the only time the word appears in Paul’s letters. It is the cry of a prophet, and Jeremiah felt the same fire (Jeremiah 20:9). But where Jeremiah complained, Paul boasts. He boasts that he preaches for free.^[2] The reward for preaching the gospel, he says, is to preach the gospel without charge. The wage is the work. Montague compares it to a retriever who wants nothing for fetching the stick except to have it thrown again.^[3]

“Though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all” (1 Corinthians 9:19). This is the arch that closes the whole chapter. Paul opened it with “Am I not free?” (1 Corinthians 9:1) and now shows what he did with that freedom: he surrendered it. Seven purpose clauses follow, each one “that I might win” someone. The one he emphasizes is the weak. To the Jews he became like a Jew; to those under the Law like one under the Law. But to the weak he simply “became weak,” no “like,” no distance. He identifies with them. And in Corinth that was a rebuke, because the weak were exactly the people the confident “knowers” of chapter 8 were trampling by eating meat sacrificed to idols in front of them (1 Corinthians 8:9-13). Paul is telling the strong that the apostle of Christ chose to stand with the people they had decided did not matter.^[4]

Then the games. Corinth hosted the Isthmian Games every two years, second only to Olympia, with footraces and boxing on the program, so Paul is using an image his readers had watched in person. “Run that you may obtain it” (1 Corinthians 9:24) is a present imperative: keep running. And the Isthmian crown was a wreath of celery, sometimes wilting before the athlete left the stadium.^[5] Every competitor “exercises self-control in all things” (1 Corinthians 9:25), and the ancients knew what that meant. Epictetus told the would-be athlete to expect a strict diet, training in heat and cold, dislocated wrists, a mouth full of sand, and sometimes defeat on top of it. If that is what a man will suffer for celery, what should a Christian do for “an imperishable” crown?^[6]

Paul’s last line matters most for today. “I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27). The verb is a boxing word; literally, he gives himself a black eye and makes his body a slave. And “disqualified,” adokimos, means more than losing. It means being shown up as counterfeit, a fake, which pairs with the shadowboxing image: a man who looks like he is fighting but never lands a blow on himself. Paul does not count on his apostleship or his preaching to save him. He fears presumption. Montague calls it a “wholesome distrust of self,” and he is blunt that the passage targets Christians who assume that being baptized into the Church guarantees the crown, regardless of how they live afterward.^[7] The next chapter drives it home: the Israelites were all baptized into Moses, and all ate the spiritual food, and most of them died in the desert anyway (1 Corinthians 10:1-5).

Now to the Gospel, which is the same warning in the mouth of Christ. Luke tells us Jesus “told them a parable,” though what follows is a string of proverbs, so the sense is that he began speaking in figures.^[8] The first: “Can a blind man lead a blind man?” (Luke 6:39). In Matthew, this saying is aimed straight at the Pharisees (Matthew 15:14), and Luke has just finished five running fights with the Pharisees and the “teachers of the law” (Luke 5:17-6:11), so the target is the same here. The disciples are about to become the teachers of the world, and Jesus is warning them that a guide who cannot see takes his followers into the pit with him.^[9] Cyril of Alexandria says Jesus added this “very necessary parable” precisely because the disciples were “the future teachers of the world,” and it “became them to know the way of a virtuous life.”^[10]

“A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). Here the proverb sits between blind guides and the beam in the eye, so the sense is that the pupil ends up as his teacher is. If the teacher sees, the pupil learns to see. If the teacher is blind, the pupil learns blindness.^[11] And the Teacher, by implication, is Jesus himself, who “came not to judge the world, but to shew mercy,” as Cyril puts it. Since Christ did not judge, why do you?^[12]

Then the beam. “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Luke 6:41). The figure is meant to be grotesque, a splinter and a roof beam, because the human habit it describes is grotesque: quick to spot the smallest flaw in another, slow to notice the plank protruding from one’s own face.^[13] Moral judgment stays; Luke 17:3 will command us to rebuke a brother who sins. Jesus forbids correcting others without first, and seriously, correcting oneself. Gadenz puts it this way: Jesus rules out “not fraternal correction (see Luke 17:3) but rather a critical spirit,” and the context points to those Pharisees who watched Jesus closely “so as to accuse” him (Luke 6:7).^[14]

The word “hypocrite” seals it. Hypokritēs is a stage word: an actor, someone playing a part. In the Gospels it is always Jesus who says it, and it always means dissembling, a gap between the face and the heart.^[15] Theophylact says these words apply “to all, and especially to teachers, who while they punish the least sins of those who are put under them, leave their own unpunished,” and the Lord calls them hypocrites “because to this end judge they the sins of others, that they themselves might seem just.”^[16] That is the diagnosis. The critic usually tries to look righteous, and the brother’s speck becomes the prop.

Saint Thomas takes up exactly this question in the Summa: whether a sinner ought to reprove a wrongdoer. His answer is careful. Sin does not destroy a man’s reason, so a sinner can still see a fault for what it is. But a prior sin gets in the way of correction for three reasons: it makes him unworthy, especially if his own sin is greater than the one he is rebuking; it causes scandal, since a known sinner correcting others looks like showing off rather than charity; and it feeds pride, the habit of thinking lightly of my sins and harshly of yours. Thomas then quotes Augustine: when we must find fault with someone, we should first ask whether we have ever been guilty of the same thing, and remember that we are weak, “in order that our reproof may be the outcome, not of hatred, but of pity.” And if we find we are guilty of the same sin, “we must not rebuke him, but groan with him, and invite him to repent with us.”^[17]

Put the two readings together, and the shape is clear. Paul preaches to others and disciplines himself first, for fear of being shown a fake. Jesus tells the future preachers of the Church that the beam comes out before the speck. Both are about the order of operations in the moral life: self first. Then, and only then, the brother. Basil said it in one line: the eye that sees everything else cannot see itself, and the mind that is quick to catch another’s sin is slow to catch its own.^[18]

Daily Application

Today’s saint is Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, martyred in 258 (his liturgical memorial falls on September 16, when he shares the day with Pope Cornelius). He is a good saint for this Gospel because he was a man who had a beam and knew it. He was a famous orator before his conversion, and after it he had a bishop’s authority, a fierce sense of the Church’s unity, and a temper. In the controversy over whether baptism by heretics was valid, he opposed Pope Stephen and would not back down even under threat of excommunication. Cyprian was wrong on the question; the Church did not follow him. What is striking is what he did in the middle of that fight. He wrote a treatise on patience. He felt the anger in himself and went after it in writing before it could do more damage. Augustine, looking back, said Cyprian atoned for that anger by his martyrdom.^[19] The beam came out. It took a while, and it took a scaffold, but it came out.

That is what Paul means by pommeling his body. He is describing a man who, having preached to others, refuses to exempt himself from what he preached. Montague’s reading is that the discipline Paul means is precisely the sacrifice of his own rights for the sake of others, the exact thing the strong Corinthians would not do.^[20] So the question this reading puts to you is about the gap between what you say and what you do. Every Catholic parent has told a child to apologize to a sibling. When did you last apologize to your spouse? Every one of us has said, of some public figure, “He should be ashamed.” What are you ashamed of, and have you taken it to confession?

Here is the interior movement the Gospel asks for. When you feel the urge to correct someone, and you will feel it today, stop and run Augustine’s test. Have I done this? Could I do this? Did I once do this and get free of it only by grace? If the honest answer is that I am doing the same thing right now, then Thomas says the correction is off the table, and what is on the table is repentance, side by side with the brother I wanted to fix. That is humbling. It is also freeing, because the critic’s life is exhausting. Keeping the ledger of everyone else’s faults is a full-time job, and the man doing it never gets to the one ledger that will be opened at his judgment.

Sin still gets named. Cyprian named it. Paul named it; he wrote 1 Corinthians to correct a church that badly needed it. Jesus himself says the goal is to “see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye” (Luke 6:42). The speck is real, and it should come out. But the order is fixed, and the order is the whole point. Take the beam out first, and you will see clearly. Skip that step, and you are a blind man offering eye surgery.

So run today the way Paul ran. Ask Saint Cyprian, who fought his own temper in ink and won in blood, to help you find the beam you have stopped noticing. Then get it out, in the confessional if that is what it takes, before you say one more word about your brother’s eye.

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Notes

1. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 155; Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 343-345. ↩
2. Collins, First Corinthians, 345-348. ↩
3. Montague, First Corinthians, 157-158. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 158-160; Collins, First Corinthians, 350-352. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 161-162; Collins, First Corinthians, 360. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 161-162, quoting Epictetus, Discourses 3.15.2-5. ↩
7. Montague, First Corinthians, 161, 163-164. ↩
8. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 114. ↩
9. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 135-136; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 641-642. ↩
10. Cyril of Alexandria, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 6:39-42. ↩
11. Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 642; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 114. ↩
12. Cyril of Alexandria, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:39-42. ↩
13. Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 642. ↩
14. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 136. ↩
15. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 114; Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 642-643. ↩
16. Theophylact, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:39-42. ↩
17. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 33, a. 5, quoting Augustine, De Sermone Domini in Monte 2.19. ↩
18. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron, Homily 9, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:39-42. ↩
19. Franciscan Media, “Saint Cyprian,” Saint of the Day, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-cyprian/. ↩
20. Montague, First Corinthians, 163. ↩

Books Cited

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• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)