Memorial of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious

Today's Mass Readings

Splinters and Beams
Recently, I got a wooden beam in my eye. Well, it felt like one, but it was just a tiny splinter of mulch. I was mulching around a tree and it blew right in. Boy, it hurt! I rushed to the nearest sink and splashed my eyes with water. I thought I got it out. But later, I was looking at myself in the mirror and…there it was. I could see it! Carefully, I removed it. There. Jeez. Then I got myself an eye appointment to make sure my eye was okay. (Thank God, it was.)

Today in the Gospel, Jesus says, “Stop judging.” But what does he mean by that? There are at least two different senses of the word “judgment”:

1. It is sometimes appropriate (and often part of one’s job) to make a reasonable judgment of another, in the sense of having an opinion about someone or making an evaluation of someone’s character.
2. But to pronounce a judgment on another, in the sense of declaring his or her guilt (outside a court of law) or his or her fate (going to heaven or hell), is the sense that Jesus means here and prohibits.

So, Jesus is teaching us not to pronounce judgments on others (the second sense), because by so doing we bring the same judgment upon ourselves. “For as you judge, so will you be judged.”

Jesus goes on to make an illustration of the first sense of the word “judgment.” When we look at other people (in the first sense of judgment) and want to take out the splinter of a fault in the eye of their soul, Jesus advises us first to consider the wooden beam of a fault in the eye of our own soul. We need to look at ourselves, as in a mirror, and carefully remove anything that would make us hypocrites for trying to remove the very same or similar fault in another.

Reflection: Today’s saint, the young Aloysius Gonzaga, probably was not one to judge others, in either sense. Rather, spreading the mercy and love he himself experienced from God. Today, let us ask to experience the same mercy and love of God, and share it with others.

Reflection by Br. Luke Kral, OSB