The word of the Lord according to which a disciple is no longer the master risks us to be very attentive to our way of acting and speaking. Ben Sirach, a Jewish sage of the Hellenistic environment whose work has come down to us in the Greek version made by his nephew and dating back to 132 BC, affirms that the value of a person is deduced from the quality, in the sense of depth and adequacy, of his language. The Lord Jesus confirms this when he says that the mouth expresses what overflows from the heart. Sometimes we use the word as a weapon although the way it may seem greasy: let me remove the speck that is in your eye. The apostle’s exhortation to progress more and more in the work of the Lord can be identified with this ability to look more and more to the treasure that is in us so as to be able to discover the treasure that is in the heart of the brother despite all the specks that can clog his gaze and the holes that make his path perilous. At any moment before us stands a hole that can become a chasm and into which we can fall if no one warns us of the danger and shows us the safest path for our tottering foot. Looking the other right in the eye without any fear of staring at him and without turning useless words, with which we try to hide the hole in which our miserable heart sometimes transforms, is equivalent to dressing this mortal body of immortality right now> . Only in this way will that deadly sting be harmless in constant search not for eyes to look at, but for specks to pick up.

Commentary by b. Michael David, osb Community of the Koinonia de la Visitation

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey