Question: What does my old self see? It does not see Christ in myself or in my neighbour or brother. It does not see and does not want to see my mistakes because the old self hates the truth and humiliation. Therefore it is necessary to practise humiliation and it need not even be artificial, I just need to stop and admit the truth. And it hurts. Besides, the old self refuses to admit that the gifts are from the Lord but adopts them as its own and seeks its own glory rather than the glory of God. So it is a theft. It is unwillingness to admit the reality, the truth.
What does the old self see in my neighbour? It sees someone else’s gifts from the perspective of envy, jealousy and a kind of competitiveness, and it does not even want to admit that my neighbour does have these gifts. It puts the speck in my brother’s eye under the microscope. The speck surely is there; however, Jesus points out that if I want to help my brother sincerely, I have to follow the correct procedure: first I have to remove the plank from my own eye and only then I can remove the speck from my brother’s eye. Naturally, the problem is that my old self does not see the plank in my own eye and if someone points it out – I am on the warpath! The old self wants to be untouchable, it hates to be told off; it does not see and does not want to see. It sees the world through the spectacles of delusion, which is caused by original sin in us which makes us see falsely from the perspective of various half-truths. We have our own faiths in ourselves and see ourselves with the eyes of this “faith”, but what a strange faith this is! Faith in our ego, faith in our infallibility, faith in our self-redemption. What is it in us? This bubble must be pierced and then our eyes will be opened. It must be pierced by our cross. Without it our eyes will not be opened. To accept the truth is painful for us.
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