Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast
while the bridegroom is with them?
The bridegroom has arrived and older paradigms are no longer sufficient. The standards for judging our actions are no longer merely legalistic, not just interpretations of written rules.
It does not concern me in the least
that I be judged by you or any human tribunal;
Our judgments cannot penetrate beyond appearances. They do not have access to the heart of the individual. And even we ourselves cannot read our own heart as well as can our Lord Jesus. We might think there would be some way we could compare ourselves with others to see what we ought to be doing. It would seem like the disciples of John the Baptist or the Pharisees ought to have the answers.
“The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers,
and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same;
but yours eat and drink.”
But the presence of the bridegroom relatives all merely external standards. It is his call and his closeness or distance alone that are meant to show us how to act. We cannot gauge this by comparing ourselves to others. We ourselves are subject to enough self-delusion that, instead of relying on our own judgment, we should try to be more like Paul.
I do not even pass judgment on myself;
I am not conscious of anything against me,
but I do not thereby stand acquitted;
the one who judges me is the Lord.
Paul did not make himself the ultimate judge even of the state of his own soul, or the worth and purpose of the actions he undertook. He would have been concerned if he knew of something against him. But apart from that he knew to focus on being near to the bridegroom and letting him be the one to judge. As long as that is the focus he can't go wrong. If he slipped into figuring things out for himself the inevitable result would be that he would use the wrong metrics, the wrong paradigms to do his reasoning, and he would come up short. He knew this all too well from his life before he met Christ. He would make himself fast when he should be feasting and feast when he needed to fast. The same is true of all of us if we rely on our own judgments more than we trust in Jesus.
When we trust in Jesus more than we care about comparisons or the judgments of others, more even than we trust our own ability to judge ourselves, we can experience immense freedom.
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