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I can finally start judging people!
Okay, I hear the protests.
From one side of me come aghast voices claiming, “Jesus said not to
judge anyone, so you can’t judge me!”
From the other side come entitled voices insisting, “Jesus didn’t say
that, He said you’ll be judged in the manner that you judge, so I can judge you
fairly all I want!” Then the first side
says, “But only God is the final judge!” and the second side says “Christ lives
in me so it IS God judging you” and the first says “You’re arrogant!” and the
second says “You’re hell-bound!” and …
Yikes. Maybe I should
have kept my mouth shut. Being a grownup
is hard.
Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll search the Scriptures to see what
I come up with. That puts me in a
minority position, of course. About 80%
of Americans don’t crack open a Bible more than once a month, if ever (American
Bible Society’s State of the Bible report, April 2023). That’s in a country claiming to be 63%
Christian (Pew Research, September 2022), which means, best case scenario on
that overlap, about half of U.S. Christians don’t really bother taking too much
of a look at the book they deem holiest.
The true numbers are probably even more grim. Self-reporting survey analyses often doesn’t
account for how people try to put themselves in a better light. Clinical psychological studies adjust for
this reality using something called the K Scale, but general surveying doesn’t
use that tool. It wouldn’t surprise me
to discover that Christians, feeling embarrassed by their own truth, might fudge
responses more in their favor when reporting on themselves and their alleged
Bible reading habits … this despite Proverbs 6:17 clearly warning that God
hates a lying tongue like theirs.
AGAIN, WHOA! DID I JUST JUDGE THEM?
Ay, caray, I did, didn’t I? And I hadn’t even cracked open the Scriptures
yet! I’m totally banging my head against
Romans 2:1, the one that tells me:
Therefore
you have no excuse, O man [or O
Yolanda], every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you
condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.
There it is, a judgmental bit about judging from the Bible
that judges me as being too judgy. It’s
as good a place as any to start, since the koine Greek “judgment” terms are flying in all
directions in this single verse. I count three, yea verily, four:
krinōn:
“the one judging”
krineis:
“you judge”
katakrineis: “you are
judging/condemning”
krinōn:
a replay of “the one judging” at verse end
In writing this verse, St. Paul makes it sting a bit more than we’re able to see in our English translations. The Greek terms rendered here as the words “you” are all singular – just one person, a solo you. Since Paul usually writes to groups, he tends to use the plural form of “you” in his Greek, humeis. English doesn’t have a distinct plural you apart from regionalisms like the cozy southern y’all or the homey New Jersey youse. By switching to the singular, Paul seems to point a finger right in my face, saying, “You getting’ this, girl?” In fact, if I were translating this passage, I might even express the “O man” as “Okay, pal?” just to get the feeling across of how Paul spotlights individuals and their individual judging habits.
You might notice, above, that words about judging have a –kri–
element in common. That’s the chunk of
the word related to judging, and it comes originally from the Greek noun krisis. Krisis is a flexible word. It basically means a separation or a
discernment, signifying anything from an opinion to an outright condemnation
(as translated in Romans 2:1 above). It
could refer to a decisive contest. It could
be a moral or civil right. The key thing
to remember is that it isn’t a negative or a positive word all by itself. It needs to be in context to deliver a full
meaning.
It’s no coincidence that krisis looks nearly
identical to the English word crisis.
Hang with me here if you think I’m getting a little too nerdy about the
language, because it really does serve an important point. Crisis in English did not originally
have an all-negative meaning. In fact,
in the medical field, the “crisis point” of a disease still signifies more of a
turning point than a disaster. Like in
koine Greek, it’s a time of decision. At
the crisis point, a sickness will either get far worse or will turn toward
recovery. A “crisis team” at a hospital
isn’t named for how badly things are going for the patient, but for the fact
that the team intervenes when the sickness or injury can go either way. The team’s job is to make it go the good way.
And that is the kind of krisis, the kind of
judgment, that Christians like me need to learn. The right setting, the right time and place,
determines whether our judging is good or bad in God’s eyes. We want our Lord to say to us, “Ortho
ekrinas,” as he said to Peter in Luke 7:43. “You’ve judged rightly.” And since we’ll one day be tasked with
judging angels (1 Corinthians 6:3), we’ll want to practice getting it right
while we’re still Earthbound.
SO WHAT HUMANS DO I GET TO JUDGE?
Every Christian, and this girl especially, needs to pause in
the moments before judging others to turn the focus inward. My favorite Scripture on self-judging comes
from Paul’s discussion of taking communion with my sisters in Christ at our
church services. 1 Corinthians 11:29-32 reads
For
anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks
judgement on himself. That’s why many of
you are weak and ill, and some have died.
But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are
disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.
The Greek –kri– fragment is working overtime in these
verses, and not just in the words translated to say “judge.” It’s there in the words “discernment” and “condemned”
as well. To my eye, this verse is a
ping-pong match between the positive and negative meanings of the word
judgment. Good judging: discerning the spiritual
depths to which the bread is “body.” Bad
judging: not discerning that.
Good judging: when we judge ourselves honestly. Bad judging: getting judged for not judging
ourselves honestly. Less-than-bad
judging: discipline from the Lord. Bad
judging for sure: the condemnation befalling the world.
Note the split there.
All the good judging derives from me believing God and judging
myself. All the bad judging comes when I
neglect those things. All the judging
that takes a punishing form, including the discipline I get, comes from God,
not from me. I’m not punishing
myself. I’m not punishing others. Vengeance is His, not mine.
BUT WHEN DO I GET TO JUDGE OTHERS?
All this self-examination is fine, but I’m still itching to
throw shade on somebody else. When do I
get to judge other people like the Christian grown up that I am? After all, a lot of people in this world
annoy me and need my direct correction.
Take politics, for example.
People love judging each other about that, and I’m not immune to giving
some eschatological, heaven-shaking significance to my own political opinions. For example, I’m dying to heap some righteous
condemnation on a classical Monetarist who doesn’t accept the Christian wisdom
of my Keynesian economic ideologies ... not to mention how much I’m pining to
hamstring a New Growth theorist with the divine realities of my Tragedy of the
Commons ideology.
Okay, those may not be the politics you were expecting, but
I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. I
already did that to a few people earlier by saying “my sisters in Christ”
without mentioning the brothers. (If
that was you getting ruffled, would you have reacted similarly if I’d only said
“brothers in Christ”? A point worth
pondering in the self-judging context of 1 Corinthians 11 above.)
The fact is, before I start taking swings at the world, I
need some more Scripture guidance. Let
me not-so-randomly plunk my finger down on 1 Corinthians 5:11-13.
But
now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of
brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler,
drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging
outsiders? Is it not those inside the
church whom you are to judge? God judges
those outside. “Purge the evil person
from among you.”
Wait a second. Does that say I am to judge those inside the church, but leave the judging of outsiders to God? That can’t be right. Most of the best stuff I could wield my wrath at occurs outside the walls of the church, stuff like opinions on taxation levels and immigration policy and books about minorities being read by non-minority school kids. Does God really expect us to focus less on that stuff and more on, say, the clerical sexual immorality rampant in the Southern Baptist Convention, the greed of a Creflo Dollar megachurch, the swindling by Peter Popoff with Miracle Spring Water donation schemes? Doesn’t God realize that when we call attention to those things, we make the church look bad? Isn’t it better simply to move forward and explain that those kinds of Christians aren’t us at all, since we’re righteously judging the world outside and telling them how off-base they are?
TWO TARGETS: MYSELF AND OTHER CHRISTIANS
My options to judge others are getting seriously squeezed
here. Call it a crisis of krisis.
I guess, though, that I still have available to me the time-honored
privilege of judging those in the pews around me. There may be some satisfaction in that if I
don’t trip over another Bible section that –
Oh. Wait. I just found James 4:11-12. And he’s talking about judging fellow
Christians, of course.
Do
not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a
brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the
law. But if you judge the law, you are
not a doer of the law but a judge. There
is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
And there it is. The
closer I look at my Bible-based judging permissions, the more careful I
discover I need to be. I can
judge me. I might get to judge
you, fellow sister or brother in Christ, but I’d better remember who the real
Judge is and who gives the laws. Am I
speaking evil against you, or am I speaking against your sin? Am I arrogantly raising myself to the role of
judge instead of trying to help you escape a wayward path? And when I wander down a wayward path myself,
can I hope for a loving attempt from you to call me back? Or will I be judged in the manner that I
judged you, reaping what I’ve sown?
I ask a lot of questions, don’t I?
I’ll close without more questions, and with a simple observation. We’re in crisis, in the modern sense of that word. We live in a world of ever-increasing Christian activism. That activism grows garrulous, loud, and, lamentably, violent. Our church, or portions of it, has decided to judge the world and move against it. It’s time we remember that the judgment throne is not ours to sit on. We must learn to judge ourselves, individually, so that we can commune as a body. We must learn to see ourselves corporately, as brothers and sisters in Christ who care about each other … and, yes, judge each other without evil intent, when required … more than we obsess about matters of the world.
Scripture says: It’s not our business to judge the world.
I say: It’s a wonder we can even see it past the planks in our own eyes.
Until next month, Marana Tha –
Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez
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