the blind leading the blind

Psalm 100 Call to Worship
Romans 12:9-18 Lesson 1
Luke 6:37-42 Lesson 2


As we mentioned last week, Lent is not so much a season to come up with epiphanies (little liturgical humor there - very little) at least not epiphanies of things we have never thought of before Rather, it is a time to wake up to what we know but what we don’t often apply in our lives. For example, we know that we are meant to be people who are joined to Jesus in his movement to reconcile people to God and to each other but we, ourselves, often prefer to brood over the wrongs we have suffered than desire to be energized to reconcile and see people hopefully. Sometimes we even get addicted to a sort of grinding pathology whereby we only look at peoples faults, rather than the good God is doing in their lives. It is hard to move in the direction to being at peace with people, as our first lesson exhorts us this morning, when you look at people that way. What helps is to remember that if we are to make any progress at all in this regard we must be disciplined to see people the way that God sees them, through the lens of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection - to see them in a new context, the context of his love for them and the future he has promised to them. If you do that you will be more likely to have your default set to desiring to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven you.

There may have been a twinkle in Jesus’ eye when he said the proverb about the blind leading the blind, because that little saying, together with the story of the log and the speck, are meant to conjure funny mental images which, in turn, would be easy to remember. The blind leading the blind really is like something out of the British comedy troupe, Monty Python. Think of it like this: a blind person says to the person sitting next to him in the village square, “hey I need to go to my next social appointment, would you guide me?” The fellow says, “yes, certainly”, but the joke is on the first guy - because the guide ends up being blind too and off into the ditch they go.

Now, the first thing to note about this little story is that it is meant to be confrontational to a certain way of approaching life. It is not offered as an abstract principle about how to choose good teachers, though it is adaptable in that way; it is rather a warning to Jesus’ followers that if they continue approaching their life with each other and God according to the way the current religious leadership of the day were teaching them, they were going to end up in the ditch. Jesus was saying that those who opposed his message of God’s grace and love for all people were blind and should not be followed. Follow the Pharisees and you end up not being able to get past their blindness which is what is meant by the comment about a student not being able to get past her teacher.

What follows in our text from Luke is a description of the way in which many of Jesus’ rival teachers were approaching human relationships and, in turn, their relationships with God. What a depressing image of a community we have here: a group of people who are bent on pointing out the faults of others, presumably in order to feel better about their own lives.

(You may remember from last week, the story of the good Samaritan, wherein the religious leader was seeking to justify himself by attempting to gain a definition of who qualified as his neighbor, a definition that would would make being a neighbor manageable, so to speak. However, Jesus disturbs him and his approach by telling the story that makes it plain that the neighbor can be anyone and anywhere. That seems to be a common theme among Jesus’ opponents, a desire to smugly justify themselves through an adherence to a manageable moral code and a manageable approach to ritual purity, all the while ignoring the condition of their hearts. Jesus said elsewhere of that approach that it was like straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel.)

Here in our text today Jesus exposes the condition of the human heart by drawing, with his words, a cartoon that describes the way we often are with people. The little picture he draws is potent! I mean it really does look silly, right? Someone is running around with a log jutting out of his eye who, instead of being worried about the log, is more worried about what he perceives to be a bit of sawdust in his neighbors’ eye. What an absurd vision but I bet it describes all of us at one time or another.

When we desire to hold power over others based on our perception of their faults, rather than being so aware of our own sins and of God’s love for us in spite of them, we can become addicted to that way of looking at others. Eventually, having only an interest in appearing to be better than others, we lose sight of the darkness in our own hearts and become numb to God’s love - what a mess!

What is the cure for this? what keeps us from running amok in that way? Well, a bit later in the gospel, Jesus says that we are to build on a firm foundation. That firm foundation includes a daily confession that Jesus was right when he said, in so many words, over and over again, that God “does not forgive us because we are good but he makes us good by forgiving us (Rowan Williams).” May that gospel truth lead us out of the ditch of self-righteousness and into the hospitable path of God’s love for all people. There is your firm foundation!


1. Have there been occasions for you where you realize that you have desired to look at people first and foremost in the context of their faults? What alarm bells go off in your head and heart when you head in that direction? Do you listen to the alarm bells?

2. Should you feel free to point out the sin of someone else? If so.....
Under what circumstances should you do that? What gives you the justification to do that? What should you say? How should it be done?

3. Is it ever right to confront someone else about something they have done wrong without leading off by choosing something appropriate to confess as a weakness or sin of your own?