Sermon for The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 2026
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Behold the speck and the plank. You see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, and you see it well; you have measured it to the grain. Yet there is a plank in your own eye. You have not seen it, cannot see it; you are blind to it even as you reach for their speck. You are the blind one who would lead the blind, and the ditch is where you are both bound. First remove the plank from your own eye. Go on, take it out. You can’t. The measure comes back full, pressed down against you, and your own hand is empty.
For you cannot become merciful. You do not have the mercy to give. The command does not call up a quality you had in reserve; it shows you the empty measure in your hand. “Become merciful,” says Jesus; become what you are not, what you cannot make yourself to be. By your own measure you are condemned, and you cannot lift it.
Still, He does not measure it back to you.
Instead, He gives. Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be put into your bosom. The measure does not come back on you; it is poured into you. Not the stingy measure you use, returned in kind; no. Rather, the Father’s own measure, full, pressed down, shaken until it settles and there is room for more, heaped until it spills over the rim and runs down your arm. This is mercy you did not earn, poured where you had earned its opposite.
For the plank was lifted. Not from your neighbor’s account; from God’s judgment of you. The Judge does not see it: because of mercy. The plank you could not lift from your own eye, Another lifted, and set upon His shoulder, and carried; and the same timber Scripture calls a plank, it calls also a beam, and as plank and beam together it became His Cross: the upright they raised Him on, the cross-beam that bore His hands. What you could not draw from your own eye, Christ was nailed upon.
Readings:
Old Testament: Genesis 50:15-21
Epistle: Romans 8:18-23
Holy Gospel: Luke 6:36-42
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