Monday, Week of 2 Lent

“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37).

If we have the courage to admit it to ourselves, we know that we’re pretty good at judging people. We judge people based on a million different things: the way they look, the way they act and, most of all, the impact they have on our lives. We judge them worthy or lacking. We find others praiseworthy or, in our hearts, we find fault and condemn.

We forget that the part we see of another person is really only the tip of the iceberg: there’s so much hidden beneath the water. When we consider people’s actions, we automatically conclude that the cause of their behaviour is rooted in their personality. But we don’t really know where their actions grow from. It could be outside pressure. It could be anything. It could even be that the actions we condemn them for are not bad, but spring from some good motivation which we can’t see.

Even with all this, we’re so good at judging. Here, Jesus tells us not to judge. What’s so wrong with judging, if we believe God is a judge who does it all the time?

Well, for one thing, we don’t know everything God knows, so we’re poor judges. But the biggest problem with judging others is what it does to our relationship with them, and with God.

Judging other people means believing that we are superior to them, better than them, less sinful than they are. The problem is that if we’re going to set up a ‘hierarchy’ by which to judge people, we’re all going to end up beneath Jesus. If we insist on a concept of judgment based on superiority, we will all end up condemned. We can never have a true relationship with God if we cling to an image of salvation based on hierarchy; hierarchy is relationship based not on love and freedom, but on command and force. Since it is for freedom that Christ sets us free (Gal 5:1), we must re-imagine relationship as love and not control.

Love without control means letting go of our own sense of superiority, letting go of judgement, letting go of condemnation. In so doing, we can embrace relationship with the God who loves and forgives. Sometimes, love without control means people will do things that end up hurting themselves or us. God challenges us to love them through it by embracing forgiveness.

That’s the kind of love God loved the world with when He Created it – he gave it the freedom to sin so that love would really be love, the kind of love that comes with freedom. If we live lives of judgment and condemnation, we are really saying that we don’t trust the Father, because He is the one that made all these bad things possible. How can we have relationship with a Father we don’t trust?

That’s the kind of love God loved the world with when he sent his only Son to take our place in the judgment. Jesus, who says ‘Take me instead,’ is asking us to live within that promise – the promise of a love that gives without demanding, that forgives without condemning, that judges not on the basis of what we deserve but by the standard that we are loved.