“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.” Are you perfect? Are you without faults? We tend to think of  perfection in terms of never making a mistake. We see ourselves as flawless or even faultless.  However, perfection from God’s perspective means being holy as God is holy. It means thinking as God thinks, seeing as God sees, listening as God listens, and loving as God loves – unconditionally, patiently, sacrificially, with understanding and always for the other. Perfection means that we constantly strive to hold onto and even retain the gift of being fully restored in the image and likeness of our Creator and perfectly living in the ways of Christ. Shifting the blame towards another does not make us error free or perfect. It just means that we managed to draw the attention from ourselves to another’s faults. So are you perfect? Are you without faults? I think about our Lord in the Garden of Eden and the conversation he had with Adam regarding his nakedness. God knew that they had already eaten from the tree they were asked not to; they already sinned, they disobeyed God’s command. When God tells Adam he has eaten of the fruit that he was not to partake from Adam responds by saying it was not his fault but God’s fault since he was the one who put “that women” here. How easy it is for us to steer the blame in another direction or to another person in order to keep our own faults hidden. Eve also deflected the fault in another direction by saying, “the serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.” Looking at our own faults is not easy. It is easier for us to deflect the attention somewhere else or to someone else. Jesus reminds us that if someone sins against us then we should pull that person to the side quietly and privately and then share the fault that caused us hurt, distress, despair, frustration, confusion. It would be good to commend to our heart and mind that fraternal correction requires charity on both sides. We should consider that how a message is received can affect how we respond. As we know, it is not always what we say but how we say it that can make all the difference. So if someone sins against you, privately tell them their fault. But remember that a gentle correction most likely will elicit a favorable response.