Monday, June 22, 2026
Monday of the Twelfth week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 7:1-5
Listen to the whole reading — MP3
First reading
2 Kings 17:5-8,13-15,18
Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. It was so because the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods, and walked in the statutes of the nations whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they made. Yet the Lord testified to Israel, and to Judah, by every prophet, and every seer, saying, “Turn from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my servants the prophets.” Notwithstanding, they would not listen, but hardened their neck, like the neck of their fathers, who didn’t believe in the Lord their God. They rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified to them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight. There was none left but the tribe of Judah only.
Responsorial psalm
Psalms 60:1,2-3,10-11
God, you have rejected us. You have broken us down. You have been angry. Restore us, again. You have made the land tremble. You have torn it. Mend its fractures, for it quakes. You have shown your people hard things. You have made us drink the wine that makes us stagger. Haven’t you, God, rejected us? You don’t go out with our armies, God. Give us help against the adversary, for the help of man is vain.
Gospel
Matthew 7:1-5
“Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged. For with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye;’ and behold, the beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.
Lectio
There is a quiet thread running through these readings, and it is the slow, almost imperceptible drift of the heart away from God. Israel did not collapse in a single dramatic moment of rebellion. They "followed vanity, and became vain" — they watched the nations around them, adopted their ways little by little, and hardened their necks against the prophets who kept calling them home. The tragedy is not so much one of sudden betrayal as of a thousand small accommodations, each one seeming reasonable, until they no longer recognized whose they were. The psalmist, surveying the ruins, finally grasps the truth that came too late: "the help of man is vain." Only when everything has trembled and torn does the cry for restoration become honest.
And here is where the Gospel meets us with unexpected mercy. Jesus is not asking us to stop caring about our brother's speck — he assumes we will still want to help. But he knows how easily we externalize our blindness, how we scan the failings of the nations around us, of our neighbors, of the Church, while the beam in our own eye grows unnoticed. Israel's downfall began precisely in this kind of self-deception: in measuring everyone else while refusing the prophets' measure against themselves. The first work of conversion is not vigilance toward others but the humble, uncomfortable turning of the lamp toward our own interior.
To remove the beam first is not self-condemnation; it is the only path to seeing clearly enough to love. When we have let God examine us, we approach our brother not as judges but as fellow patients in the same hospital, both in need of the Physician's hand.
Where in your life have you been slowly "following the nations" — quietly adopting the values of those around you in a way you would not have accepted all at once?
Whose speck have you been studying lately, and what is the beam in your own eye that this preoccupation might be helping you avoid?
Saint of the day
St. Thomas More, Martyr (1478-1535)
Ora reads this aloud, every morning, free. Ora