“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the same measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye, when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:1-5)
Jesus’s words are filled with wisdom. His insights expose a deep judgmental impulse in all human persons that see fault in others while failing to hold ourselves to the same standard. Jesus employs an ironic image to make a compelling point. A person with a plank in their eye believes they see something small in someone else’s eye. Jesus is not only exposing this impulse, he is challenging us to question what we think we see. There is a partial dimension to human knowledge that the metaphor of sight is getting at. We see in part and know in part because we are finite and thoroughly sinful beings. While it is important to trust our instincts and knowledge base, we must do so by holding them in tension with self-awareness, honesty, and humility. Humans are prone to arrogance and self-deception even when they think their intentions are good. We always know what someone else needs to do. And that is the problem and second lesson I think Jesus is teaching. He is also challenging us to do the hard work of self-examination and correction before we seek to correct others.
Churches often use this text to challenge how we judge other individuals. I see a broader import. I know I sound like a broken record (ask my students), but we need to ask ourselves what happens to this impulse when we get in groups, especially groups doing social justice advocacy. I’ll tell you what happens. We end up with forms of “judgmental groupthink” in which one group is convinced, they see faults in the smallest things “with them.” I am sure you have heard groups saying “they need to do this and that.” What judgmental groups miss are the planks obscuring their vision so they do not see their own faults and the hard work they must take up. We also end up with groups that hold other groups to a higher standard than they do for themselves. Is it not ironic just how critical we can be of other groups while being understanding and patient with our own groups. Jesus’s word indicts unhealthy aspects of group judgmentalism that make it nearly impossible for us to approach our collective stewardship of privilege. One reason it is hard to do this is because the term is often weaponized.
Beyond Weaponizing Privilege
When I was introduced to this topic, it was in a Christian setting and framed as an issue of “neighbor love” not being a tool to attack others. I read Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” It listed 50 hidden benefits she is afforded as a white person that black and brown people do not have. The essay sought to foster self-awareness and encourage White Americans to see the hidden realities of race and racism. McIntosh stressed the importance of listening, educating ourselves, broadening our experiences, and taking action. The essay was an incredibly helpful tool that helped white neighbors respond to neighbors who are different. More importantly, it was a tool all students were invited to apply to hidden forms of privilege they don’t see and how it affects others.
McIntosh’s work opened my eyes in specific ways to the world I had lived in for decades. I knew I was underprivileged as an African American. She provided real insight into the ways race shaped my world, limiting possibilities and opportunities for me while affording them to White Americans. Her work also helped me to understand how a sinful and fallen world works. This is where the import of her work is often missed. If the world is God’s neighborhood, then everyone is a neighbor we are called to love in word and deed (1 John 3:16-18). This means privilege is, ultimately, an invitation to understand how a fallen world works, to see and address our complicity in its systems so that we may truly love our neighbors. Those conversations from my days at Louisville Seminary about this complex topic were different than our discourse today. We weren’t arguing and pointing fingers at each other. It was sobering to see the world and each other this way. In our public racial discourse, privilege is a pejorative term that many equate with being a “bad person.” The topic of privilege, particularly white privilege, creates so much anger, tension, and ultimately confusion.
Maybe a deep engagement with the gospel of Jesus is the missing element in conversations about privilege. How should disciples of Jesus steward privileges afforded them by unjust social systems? Removing the gospel from the topic of privilege and our responsibility to others does a disservice to the gravity of the topic. When we allow our loyalty to social groups to trump God’s kingdom, it prevents us from doing radical things, like examining how social systems unevenly treat people in unjust ways, from denying our own sacrificing for the gospel by not absolutizing those privileges. Jesus did say, “you cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). It is as if when the issue of social privilege comes up, the call of the gospel goes out the window. The gospel of Jesus does not allow us to do this. Institutional Christianity might. Congregational Christianity might. But the gospel is a radical call to self-denial, self-sacrifice, and love of God and neighbor, which means we cannot escape the privileges we enjoy and their relation to others.
Let’s Shift the Conversation from “You Have Privilege to We Have Privilege”
Last month I talked about the narrow ways churches talk about stewardship (finances, time, spiritual gifts) and asked what it would mean to think of social privileges as a stewardship issue. This month I turn to Matthew 7 as an invitation to move beyond weaponizing privilege by seeing the difficulty we all have relinquishing privileges that hurt others. I invite us to shift how we begin conversations about privilege away from indicting others to seeing how most of us are privileged in different ways. The world is structured unjustly and wraps our lives into systems that are not good for us and our neighbors. It takes radical action, vigilance, and sacrifice to stop allowing these systems to do damage to us and others, even if it benefits us in some way.
Jesus’s words in Matthew 7 capture some of the difficulty we have reimagining the issue of privilege given the toxic nature of our political discourse today. It is much easier to tell someone else that they have privilege they should divest themselves of and to pull out our stopwatch as we expect them to do it now. What’s hard is to see our own privilege and refusal to do anything significant about it. It is one thing to call out my white sisters for holding onto privileges afforded them by centuries of enslavement and institutional racism; it is another to see and call out the centuries of sexism and patriarchy that afford me so many privileges as a man. For the past few years, I have been grappling with the privileges Americans enjoy at the expense of sisters and brothers in Asia, Africa, Central America, and South America. It has been illuminating to see the ways I enjoy privileges as an American, in spite of the ways this country disenfranchises me. I can be both disenfranchised as a minority in America and privileged as a global citizen.
It started with a book I was assigned by one of my seminary professors, Dr. Francis Adeney. The book title is The High Cost of Low Prices. It was the first time I was exposed to the impact of U.S. policies and business practices on people in other parts of the world. More recently, I have been struggling over the mining of coltan in the Congo. Every day, I carry a cell phone and use laptops and tablets. I ask myself am I being a responsible consumer by supporting companies participating in violence and exploitation in the name of profit? I wonder if I am being a good neighbor. I see just how complicit I am typing these words on a device made possible by the oppression of others. Now what do I do about this? What does it mean to relinquish these privileges? Do you see how incredibly complex this is? Even if you wanted to do something, figuring out what to do is not easy. Instead of attacking each other about a particular privilege the other enjoys, we need to partner together to find practical and meaningful ways to do what is just and right for all God’s children.
Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for calling us out because weaponizing privilege to judge others excuses us from seeing the incredibly difficult work we all need to do. That is the work I try to do each and every day. I invite you to join me. Maybe together, we can make a real difference in the lives of sisters and brothers near and far.