It was in the supermarket on a
Friday morning. I was idly picking over the produce, figuring out what I would
bring home for dinner, when I heard a wail behind me. I turned, and there was a
mother with a toddler in the shopping cart. The little one was trying to escape
and the mom was desperately trying to get her to stay put. “No, sweetie. You
don’t want to fall out. Mommy needs you to stay in the cart.” “Want OUT!!! Want
OUT!!!!” the little one howled. I felt bad for the mom – I had been there
myself a few times when my children were little, and there is nothing quite as
embarrassing and frustrating as when you cannot get your child under control
and he or she is screaming bloody murder.
To my left, an older woman was
sighing melodramatically. “If she can’t keep that child quiet, she shouldn’t
bring her into the store. It’s aggravating!”
She turned to the mother and said
“You don’t belong in here if you can’t shut her up.” The mother wheeled the
cart away from the produce aisles, her face as red as a tomato, as she tried to
escape the judgment of the other woman.
Judging…it’s a behavior we turn
to more often than we should. We could make the point that none of us should
ever judge anyone else, that only God has the right to judge, but from a
practical standpoint, we do occasionally judge, whether we are on a jury or are
inspecting our teenager’s supposedly cleaned room. Still, judgment is dangerous
business, because we often do it without all the data to make a wise verdict.
That may be some of what is going
on in today’s Gospel. Jesus, as we remember from last week, is in his hometown,
and he has just stunned the people in the synagogue by proclaiming that he is
the embodiment of the prophecy about the Messiah. And how do the listeners
respond? At first, they seem to be amazed by his words, and are especially
amazed because this is someone whom they have known all their lives, a local
boy. But something in the air must have shifted, because Jesus seems to react
badly. He challenges them: “I’ll bet you don’t believe me. I’ll bet you want to
see miracles that will prove to you that I am who I say I am. You are judging
me, even though you are not saying the words aloud, and I rebuke you…you, who
should know me best, do not know me at all. It will only be the outsiders who
will recognize who I am.”
Pretty insulting response, isn’t
it? And not surprisingly, they react with rage. How dare this whippersnapper
judge us? And yet, he is right – he who is the only one who has the right to
judge – and he sees what will happen. They will not accept him – they will
judge him and find him not what they expected or wanted as a Messiah. They
respond with anger and drive him out to the edge of town. They want to shove
him over a cliff, but he slips away before they can exact their sentence upon
him, these judges in the little synagogue.
Judging is dangerous business,
and these people who judged Jesus did not have all the information they needed
to make a wise judgment – in fact they didn’t even want all the information.
They simply wanted to execute someone who made them intensely uncomfortable.
But what if they had gone a
different way in that Sabbath conversation? What if they had followed the
guidance that Paul offered the early Christians?
“Love is patient; love
is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not
insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in
wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.”
What if, instead of
judgment, they had offered love? Might they have understood the truth that
Jesus was offering them?
Paul understood that
we human beings know only a part of the story, a part of the truth: “For we
know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes,
the partial will come to an end.” Paul knew that judging prematurely, for our
own self-aggrandizement, was pronouncing a verdict without all of the facts. We
know only in part.
So in the meantime,
if we are so flawed in the judging business, what is left to us? Love. Only
love.
Are we meant to be in
the judging business or the love business? I’d say it’s definitely love.
Now it’s important
that I insert a disclaimer in here. This particular reading from Paul’s letter
to the Corinthians is usually used at weddings and at funerals. It is usually
framed as a model of what marriages are supposed to be like, all warm and cozy and
full of mutual respect, or as a paean to the superb life of the departed, who
was the model of love. But Paul wrote this for a different purpose: the
Corinthians were in trouble. They were arguing among themselves, most likely
because they were busy judging each other as to who was the best follower of
Christ. Some of them were doing some very unchristian things, and others were
making a stink about it. And Paul needed to sort them out and say “Stop
judging! Start behaving like good followers of Christ and start thinking about
how we need to stick together!”
It’s hard to stick
together if you’re busy telling your friend that he is off-base about
something, or telling your children that if they don’t straighten up and fly
right they’re going to hell.
Paul wasn’t talking
about romance, or doing a eulogy. He was saying that it is hard to live in this
world. We have all sorts of stuff coming at us every day, and we don’t have all
the information we need about it – we see through the glass darkly – and yet we
have to survive and work together. We have to find a way to love each other
even when we have differing opinions, even when we are confused, even when we
feel isolated. We will not have all the information we wanted in this life. We
might be surrounded by people who disagree with us. We may see others reap
glory by being boastful or by doing things that gain admiration from the
crowds. The only thing that we can do in the face of such confusion, such
anxiety, is to love.
It seems a little
crazy, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be arguing our case? Shouldn’t we be telling
others who are incorrect how wrong they are?
In the immortal words
of Dr. Phil, how’s that been working for you?
Not very well, I
would imagine. It rarely does. But what if the path we take is not about
winning or judging or correcting…what if the path is simply to look at another
and say “you are a child of Christ. I love you.”
Can you imagine what
that conversation might be like, if we got out of the judging business and got
into the loving business?
Amen.
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