The Bible is full of near-to-impossible suggestions, if not demands, none more daunting than the not judging of others. Worse still, being warned to expect the same judgment on ourselves that we apply to others.
What exactly is meant by the judgment of others? It seems near-to-impossible to seriously judge someone, inasmuch as one is cognizant of one’s non-possession of one’s own authentic, valid, omniscient narrator for the lives of others.
The intentionality behind another person’s actions, except on rare and special occasions, is not transparent and available for the discernment of the person who, nonetheless, dissects the motives and intentions behind someone’s actions.
“I know what he’s doing. I know what he’s thinking. I know why he did that!”
If you don’t have that response to another person, you can’t live in this world. We have standards and codes of behavior, and we have the countless exceptions and variations on every single one of them a thousand times every single day.
We like some people because we appreciate how they behave, how they interact with others. Other people seem far afield from any compatibility. Shrug– the world takes all kinds.
My own behavior is certainly not to the liking of every person under all circumstances. Sometimes, someone expects an attitude on my part that I do not have, and, furthermore, would never want to possess.
There are misunderstandings. I will judge a person who I think behaves in an unkind and dastardly fashion at my expense.
Qoheleth says, “All is vanity.”
I take offense, because I know I’ve been ill-done by, or someone else has been ill-done by. Why would someone do such a thing?
That pre-supposes that one knows what that person intended to do. That pre-supposes that one knows why that person intended to ill-do that person. It’s an initial reaction and outburst that seems as self-explanatory as the ill deed.
Fair to say that if he ill-done by vows revenge, that exemplifies the classic, negative judgment.
Simply to say, and believe, you really don’t know why something happened, but you’re not sure the person can be blamed, because he simply doesn’t know why something happened, is an acquittal– also a judgment.
When I don’t know why I myself sometimes do things I wouldn’t want to repeat, and can’t explain, and harm other people, I try to apply that ignorance to my own self in a way that realistically acknowledges my limits and imperfections, and doesn’t suggest that it’s my own fault that I sometimes fall short at ideally performing every thing in life.
To be proven wrong can be a shocking thing, but it doesn’t happen as often as it could. One makes unspoken assumptions about anything and everything, and nothing comes that isn’t well within the range of known possibilities, so one thinks one has a good idea what’s happening. Because we are not proven wrong, we assume we are right. That is probably not true a lot more than we will ever know.
With wrong-doing comes the opportunity for redemption.
The road to redemption can be off-puttingly humbling. One sometimes must cast one’s self down and acknowledge a shortcoming to someone who has shown no inclination to ever do likewise (my assumption, probably so wrong that I hopefully would never say that out loud about anyone, as strongly as I thought it). One does this, not for that person, not for one’s standing in the community, but for one’s own self, because it takes an adult to behave like an adult. One realizes the gravity of the Scriptures about the need for humility, and peace-making, and realizes, sometimes, one must be the one to pay the most expensive personal cost to fulfill that ideal.
Who hasn’t had enemies? How often have the great ones of history been brought down by someone of seemingly comparitively zero import? But we remember how the prophets, the martyrs, the great ones, persevered and remained faithful to the highest ideals under extreme distress and duress. That’s how we would like to be remembered. But to take that chance, and make that choice, when it comes, in the dark privacy of obscurity, is the man-sized task of faith. When it all plays out in ignorance and doubts, one has the consolation that one has subjugated his darker instincts and submitted his conscience to the guide of the Scriptures, in weather both fair, and foul.
If I suffer the consequences now of having acted poorly because of my own shortcomings, perhaps that will reflect well on me, when my final judgment comes. If I have accused another and justified myself, where will I stand when I am judged for the accusations against me? I don’t even know what the accusations will be, what they are, but I have to assume they might be really, really bad, and far worse than I’ll expect.
“How about,” the court decided, “you go back to Earth and redo that situation?”
It seems easy to say, “Instead of pushing that person down the stairs, I will accuse myself of having been the wronghead in that one, and apologize.”
A hard paradox is that, never is it harder to be the taller man than when one’s foe seems to be about a moral inch tall. Vanity is always an inch taller, and never wants to be the inch smaller. Hopefully, one’s best conscience will, ultimately, be more enlightened, and more persuasive.
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