No Condemnation: A Reflection by Fr. David

While driving back from Massachusetts with my son Aidan earlier this week, we had a conversation about the incessant need people have to judge others. He had witnessed it during the college visit he had just finished, and he sees it regularly among his peers: this need to put others down, to find reasons to think less of them. And as we talked, he suddenly said, "And here I am being judgmental about judgmental people!"

I am tempted to say that judging others is one of our favorite pastimes. We constantly criticize people based on their poverty or their ostentatious wealth, their social status or lack thereof, their appearance, their schools, their neighborhoods, their jobs, their friends . . . you name it. As Clairee says in Steel Magnolias, "If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me!" But judging others is not merely a wicked diversion or a cruel parlor game: it is almost like a reflex action, something we do instinctively without even thinking about it. And as much as we direct it outwards to others, I see how often people direct such judgment at themselves as well, condemning themselves for reasons great and small. I can't tell you how many pastoral conversations I have had with people who essentially despise themselves for their perceived failings and general inadequacy.

So the words of the Gospel in our Wednesday Eucharist this week really hit me hard: God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him (John 3:17). God has no interest in condemning us. Let me repeat that:

God has no interest in condemning us.

That goes so against our grain that we should stop and just let it sink in. There is an old Hasidic adage that says, "God created human beings in God's image, and then human beings turned around and returned the favor." We have too often created a god that is just like us: judgmental, unkind, and unforgiving; in short, a god who condemns. People sometimes point out with dismay passages from the Bible where God is presented as harsh and vindictive, even cruel. Such passages are indeed revelatory, but what they reveal is not God's nature but our own nature. We are this way, so we naturally presume that God must be some super-sized version of us.

But God is not like us. Jesus both teaches us and shows us that God is not in the condemning game. God desires to set us free from all of that nonsense, free from the need to to run others down, free from the need to trash ourselves. When God looks at the people we most look down on, God sees beloved and broken children. When God looks at us, God sees beloved and broken children. That God yearns only to love us and make us whole. The only judgment we need to fear, the most poignant judgment of all, is the one we pronounce on ourselves. As that passage from John goes on to say, And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people loved darkness rather than light (John 3:19).

One vital way of living the resurrection, of living as people of light, is to get out of the condemnation game ourselves. It's a bit tricky: when we catch ourselves judging others (which can happen a lot!), we don't want to then judge ourselves. Better to smile, recognize what we are doing, and gently let it go, even if that means doing it a hundred times a day or a thousand times a day. It is an act of liberation. And, you know, we can do that: the Holy Spirit lives in us and wants us to do that. And the Spirit shows us through experience how wonderful it feels to do that. I can honestly say that in my moments of greatest joy and deepest peace, I feel no condemnation towards anyone. A taste of heaven? According to Jesus, yes it is.