Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
If we wish to receive mercy we must be willing to become channels of mercy. Unfortunately, we tend to mistakenly believe that judging and condemning are necessary, that we will not be safe if we don't judge and condemn evil wherever we find it. It is true that God has not called us to ignore the negative things which we do inevitably encounter in the world. Such willful ignorance would be the precise conditions that would allow things like systemic racism to persist in our midst. Instead, God is calling us to be active agents of his reconciliation. He says to us that it isn't enough to just see the bad and criticize it. We must work to restore and rehabilitate anyone who is deserving of judgment and condemnation. After all, this is already God's own attitude toward us.
An important aspect of this attitude of active reconciliation is that we can't simply hide behind condemnations to protect ourselves from entering into dialog with others. Why do we feel it so necessary to hide from them? Is it not because we fear to see that they finally aren't so different from ourselves, that both we and they stand in need of the same mercy from God? What business do we have condemning them?
Give and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.
What should we do when we are struggling, when we are in need, or going through difficult times? We should give. In the mystery of the economy of the Kingdom of God we only truly find ourselves when we give ourselves away. We discover peace and happiness more and more to the degree that we get ourselves off of our minds and learn to act from the higher motivation of love.
For the measure with which you measure
will in return be measured out to you.
In order to stop judging, stop condemning, to start forgiving and giving, we must learn to stop seeking rewards from people. When we are wronged we look for retribution, even something as simple as someone admitting they were wrong. When we give a gift we feel slighted if our gift is not recognized. But God calls us to seek our reward in him first and to let him deal with others. When we learn to leave others in the hands of God he is able to do things in their hearts that our desire to be right and rewarded often block. It may be said that society still has a role of judgment for the preservation of good order. But from an individual standpoint we shouldn't seek our own consolation in that, but rather in God himself.
By accepting God's call to be merciful we dispose ourselves to receive mercy. By recognizing and desiring mercy for others we learn to see them through God's eyes. When finally we begin to see them as not fundamentally different from ourselves we begin to know the depths of our own need. We are freed from illusions of self-sufficiency and are able to receive more and more the mercy God longs to give us.
But yours, O Lord, our God, are compassion and forgiveness!
Yet we rebelled against you
and paid no heed to your command, O LORD, our God,
to live by the law you gave us through your servants the prophets.
These are wonderful thoughts on a wonderful passage. I particularly like the observation that criticizing and condemning is not merely not enough, but it not actually a part of the restoring and rehabilitating that we are called to.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the statement that looking for someone to admit their wrong is a form of retribution. I've never liked at it this way, but having read it you've revealed one of those truths that seems so clear I feel like I was looking at it the whole time and just blind to it. It's true, and I think this realization will help me to battle it better. Thank you.