25 June 2018
Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
As we reflect this week on our Christian mission, Jesus offers us this hard teaching regarding judgement. Looking around at the world, it seems like this is the only part of the Bible anyone recalls or refers to; how often do we hear someone—be it in our midst, or in the media—say, “Don’t judge!” But we so often forget why Jesus exhorted us to stop judging: it isn’t because it is wrong, but rather because there are consequences to judging unjustly.
A Jesuit author named Fr. Gonsalves writes, albeit sternly, “Our first and foremost work is to attend to the salvation and perfection of our own soul. One who neglects himself with the idea of devoting himself to the welfare of others is working under an illusion. He will save neither his own soul nor the souls of others. In the work of salvation we are mere instruments in the hands of God. Unless we are holy, as a rule God does not use us as his instruments to sanctify others.” In other words, a lifeguard who cannot himself swim cannot save a person who is drowning; following the same logic, how can a person who is not himself striving for holiness presume to call another to it? How can God use a person as an instrument of holiness if they, in their persistent sin (or having turned a blind eye of denial to it), are resisting His will to begin with? Jesus uses the image of a person noting a splinter in one person’s eye while having at the same time a beam in his own: the person judging poorly has a beam because not only is his eye occluded, but his presumption makes him all the more blind compared to the one he is seeking to “help” by his observations.
However, Jesus tells us, if we strive after our own holiness and purification, we thus allow the Lord to judge and convict us in our hearts for our own need of a divine “ophthalmologist” to treat our own spiritual blindness. Otherwise when we point out the faults in others, when we point out their sins and shortcomings, we do them no good but rather condemn ourselves, as arrogant kettles calling the pot black, so to speak, compounding our own sins with that of pride. Again, Jesus does not absolutely forbid us from judging others (John 7:24), but He warns us to have our own houses in order before we tell our neighbor that theirs is in need of cleaning.
For “…the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” This should sound familiar to us who pray so often the Lord’s Prayer: “…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” So often when we judge we do so in haughtiness rather than pity, self-righteousness rather than genuine concern for the other’s soul. The consequence of judging others unjustly, Jesus warns, is that as we judge others, so we shall be judged by God. If we judge with little mercy, we shall be judged with little mercy; if we judge with great love, we shall be judged with great love, and we cannot judge with such love unless first we have brought ourselves before the Just and Merciful Judge and experienced it for ourselves. Then, perhaps, we can admonish the sinner (a spiritual work of mercy, no less); then perhaps we can judge justly and prudently, with clear eyes and tender hearts.