Our society is not much help. A recent Time magazine had a big article about who was to blame for the current financial crisis, replete with Photoshopped pictures of the judged in a spoofed police lineup. No need for a judge or jury there, these 25 are already convicted in the court of public opinion. This type of thing has become a mainstay of the media, from the op-ed pages of the papers to the screaming pundits on TV. And then there are the lawyers and the court system, the great substitute for personal responsibility and common sense, where the blame game is played at the highest level. When bad things happen, we just need to judge someone responsible and we'll feel better. Except we don't.
I think most people would read today's gospel as "Stop judging (other people) and you will not be judged (by God)." That certainly is a very direct and obvious meaning, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But read the whole reading:
Jesus said to his disciples:
"Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.
For the measure with which you measure
will in return be measured out to you."
There's more to it than just avoiding God's judgment, though that would be lesson aplenty. Jesus is also telling us how to live our lives and to literally make "Thy kingdom come...on earth as it is in heaven". In his book of reflections Here and Now, Henri Nouwen says:
Imagine having no need at all to judge anybody. Imagine having no desire to decide whether someone is a good or bad person. Imagine being completely free from the feeling you have to make up your mind about the morality of someone else's behavior. Imagine that you could say: "I am judging no one!"
Imagine -- Wouldn't that be true inner freedom? the desert fathers from the fourth century said: "Judging others is a heavy burden." I have had a few moments in my life during which I felt free from all the judgements about others. It felt as if a heavy burden had been taken away from me. At those moments I experienced an immense love for everyone I met, heard about, or read about. A deep solidarity with all people and a deep desire to love them broke down all me inner walls and made my heart as wide as the universe.
Friends, THAT is what Jesus was also trying to teach us. He has told us all along to love our neighbor. This is a key to how you do it -- by withholding all judgment about your neighbor.
Nouwen goes on to say we all have these moments if we are attuned to the Holy Spirit: "They are like glimpses of heaven, glimpses of beauty and peace." Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
But how do we change, when so much of what we hear and see and experience reinforces that we are constantly judged ourselves, and that we need to judge others just to survive?
Can we free ourselves from the need to judge others? Yes...by claiming for ourselves the truth that we are beloved daughters and sons of God. As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to the need to put other people in their "right" place. To the degree that we embrace the truth that our identity is not rooted in our success, power, or popularity, but in God's infinite love, to that degree we can we let go of our need to judge...
...God's judgment is not the result of some divine calculation of which we have no part, but the direct reflection of our lack of trust in God's love. If we think of ourselves as the sum total of our successes, popularity, and power we become dependent on the ways we judge and are being judged and end up as victims manipulated by the world. And so we bring judgment on ourselves...
Only when we claim the love of God, the love that transcends all judgments, can we overcome all fear of judgment. When we have become completely free from the need to judge others, we will also be completely free from the fear of being judged.
So from this vantage point we can see some of Jesus' other teaching in a slightly different light. If we start at the place where we accept and truly believe that we are God's beloved, nothing in this world has quite the same hold on us. We stop judging others, and when that happens we not only don't fear others' judgment, but others no longer seem to judge us either.
This last observation has been one of the biggest surprises on my journey to being less judgmental. Not only does judging less transform me, it seems to transform others in relation to me, making them kinder and more forgiving of me. There's no way else I can explain it any different or better than Jesus did in today's Gospel. All that time I was trying to figure it out, and it was all right there in that passage from Luke all along.
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