Easier Said Than Done
A few years ago, I heard an expert on tornado safety speak on the radio. He had devoted his career to improving tornado safety, and lowering the number of people who get hurt or killed by tornadoes. Much of his efforts boiled down to one simple idea: when there is a tornado coming, immediately go down into your basement and find a windowless room. The last thing you should do is go outside and take a look. It’s simple, it’s logical, it’s well-known – you have probably heard it before. This expert said even though he had spent years trying to get others to listen to this advice, he himself had never been in a tornado.
Then the day came when a tornado approached his own home, and he heard the sirens. What did he do? He went outside to take a look. That was the moment he discovered something about making true progress: sometimes it’s easier said than done. Sometimes wise advice goes against human nature, and it is not easy to get people to choose the path of wisdom instead of instinct.
I think about that man a lot when I read the Bible. There are many passages in the Bible that have the same qualities as that tornado advice: they are simple, logical, and well-known. They are easy to accept at face value, and it is easy to go about your life thinking you can follow them.
The Golden Rule is a perfect example: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is only nine words long, easy to remember, and you can immediately grasp the wisdom of the reasoning – it makes perfect sense. Yet, just like the instruction to not go outside to look at the tornado, sometimes it’s not until a vivid situation arises that you realize something about the Golden Rule: it is easier said than done.
In Luke 6, there is an equally familiar idea, and if you think about it, you can see that it is a variation on the Golden Rule. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.”
Okay, got it. It reminds me of a movie from the 1980s called Do the Right Thing. It’s a complex movie but my favorite scene is a very simple one that happens in the middle. The character of Mookie (Spike Lee) is walking down a ghetto street delivering a pizza, and an old man who calls himself ‘The Mayor’ stops him to provide an important lesson: “Always do the right thing.” Mookie leans over and says, “That’s it?” The Mayor replies, “That’s it.” Mookie assures him, “I got it; I’m gone.” You could call that the shortest possible summary of the Bible: always do the right thing. Too bad the character of Mookie goes on to do a number of wrong things.
So as I read the Bible, when I hear “Do not judge, and you will not be judged,” it is easy for me to respond by saying, “I got it; I’m gone.” But like the character from the movie, I then go on to ignore those instructions and frequently ‘Do The Wrong Thing.’
How can you go through life without judging? Is that even possible? That verse doesn’t say “Do not judge people”– it just says “Do not judge,” so one reading is that we should not judge anything. That would be very difficult, given how much we evaluate things and rate things in daily life – “This is my favorite restaurant, I don’t like that restaurant.” Last week I bought a guitar, and of course before I bought it I looked up customer ratings, which are nothing more than people’s judgments. But I’m sure Jesus was talking about judging people, and I can separate my reactions to things from my reactions to the people who made those things.
You could also say that “do not judge” refers only to negative judgments. The verse says “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.” That makes it sound like only harsh judgement is the problem, and it is okay to call someone “the best football player of all time” or “the world’s greatest mother.” Calling someone the worst at something is uncharitable, so perhaps it is a version of “If you can’t say something nice about your neighbor, don’t say anything at all.” Still, saying that one person is good also implies that another person isn’t, so there is still judgment there.
The other issue is that I know it is important to have a sense of right and wrong, and it is difficult to say “This behavior is wrong… but the person who is doing it should not be judged.” Yes, on an intellectual level I can try to condemn the behavior, not the person, but it is easy to blur the two. The instinct to sort the world into good people and bad people seems fundamental to our nature, just like going outside to see the tornado.
Still, on an intellectual level, “judge not” does have those qualities: it is a simple command, it is logical, and it is a well-known Bible verse. That does not make it easy to obey. I must not condemn anyone… except perhaps for world leaders who start unnecessary wars that kill and displace millions of people. Do not condemn anyone… except for mass shooters who plan their violence for weeks. Do not condemn anyone… except that parent who abusing their child. Do not condemn anyone… except for the driver who just passed me on the highway driving 90 miles per hour. Can’t I judge them just this once?
I respect individuals that make efforts to try to follow this commandment. But even if you try to follow it, things can go wrong. Take, for instance, the sign from a church that reads: “No judgmental people allowed; all others welcome.” Do they even recognize that this means making judgments about who is a judgmental person? What exactly would you do if a “judgmental person” showed up? And it would be easy for me to make fun of this sign, to call them judgmental or at least inconsistent, and look down on them. But then I would be going against Jesus’ words myself.
It makes me think of an assignment that I give to students in my Persuasion Theories course: take concepts about persuasion they learn from the textbook, and use them to reduce bullying. It is easy for them to recognize that bullying is a severe problem in the modern world, especially on the internet. The tough question is, what to do about it? Some students take the approach of coming down harshly on any bullying behavior: you have to call out the bullies and punish them to stamp out this kind of behavior once and for all. They do not recognize the issue with that approach. If you look closely at a lot of cyberbullying, it is done by people who feel like they ought to come down harshly on someone else’sbehavior, call them out, and stamp out that behavior once and for all. The internet is full of people who are quick to judge, and who feel like they are “social justice warriors” taking on noble battles – but they do not recognize that this kind of judgment is causing problems too. I sometimes get the feeling that if everyone is on the lookout for unacceptable behavior, and would throw the guilty in prison – either literally or the internet version of prison – then eventually we will all be locked up. As Jesus said, “He who is without sin among you, cast the first stone.”
Finally, this leads to one more potential problem: self-judgment. What if you hear Jesus say, “Do not judge,” and think to yourself, “Uh-oh – I do that all the time!” It would be easy to slip into berating yourself and condemning yourself. In other words, you may look at your own behavior, recognize that you have been a bully to others, and decide that the solution is to turn that behavior inward: instead of beating up others, go ahead and beat up on yourself. Will that fix it?
Well, one thing the Lord makes clear in the Bible, and through the books of Emanuel Swedenborg, is that the process of repentance is a crucial part of our spiritual growth, so I do not want to imply that the solution is to accept our flaws and not try to fix them. Mark Pendleton, a Swedenborgian minister in Illinois, has spent his life studying about the repentance process, and turning it into tangible steps we can do: examining ourselves to see our bad habits, acknowledging those bad habits, confessing them, praying to the Lord for help in shunning those bad habits, and turning away from them to begin a new life. What is not included in this process is: condemning yourself, beating yourself up, wallowing in shame and loathing.
How Not To Judge
Turning our attention back to not judging others, even if I reach an understanding of what not judging others means, I still need help in figuring out how to do it. Telling myself it is something I should not do is not enough. Those judgmental instincts are quick and powerful, so I need something to counteract them instead of just trying to suppress them.
There are three tools that may be helpful to you in learning to not judge others. The first is the effort to truly understand others, and that also requires that we not rush to judgment against them, and instead acknowledge that we never fully understand what they are going through or what led to their behavior. It is easy to be fooled by appearances and jump to conclusions about why others act the way they do. Abraham Lincoln had an expression: “I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.” Getting to know someone better does not guarantee that you will like them – but it usually helps, and there are bound to be things you misunderstood about them. This is true for strangers, but also for close friends and family members; I think it is healthy to never assume that you know them fully. If you do not have the opportunity to get to know them better (such as that person who zoomed past you on the highway), at least acknowledge that you do not know what they are dealing with in life. And as I said in a sermon last November, it is an angelic practice to assume that others have good intentions unless you see evidence to the contrary.
A second tool I find helpful is to rethink your definition of the word “sin.” People have a tendency to think of that word as being very “heavy” and consequential, and to make the connection between sin and condemnation. But in one of my father’s sermons he explained that the word “sin” did not originally have all those dire connotations. He compared it to when something goes wrong on your computer and you get an error message: something is wrong, and needs to be fixed. But that does not mean you throw your computer away. It’s better to think of it as “It’s time for a course correction.” So if someone else sins, instead of thinking “That’s it – they are going to hell forever for that,” you can instead think, “There’s something that seems to be not working correctly in their life; I hope they can do a course correction and fix that error.” In other words, the term that we should learn to connect with the word “sin” is not “condemnation” but “forgiveness.” In the book of Luke, after Jesus arose from the dead, it says he “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations’.”
Third, there is a concept that Swedenborg talks about often in his works, but is not widely believed in the Christian world. It is the concept of spiritual equilibrium, which is explained in the book True Christianity, section 69: “As long as we are living in the world, we all walk midway between heaven and hell. Therefore we are in an equilibrium. We can freely choose to look either upward to God or downward to hell. If we look upward to God, we recognize that all wisdom is from God and that in our spirits we are actually with angels in heaven. If we look downward (as we inevitably do if we have false thinking from an evil heart), in our spirits we are actually with devils in hell.” There is a more extensive explanation in True Christianity 475-478. This contradicts the idea that people are condemned by evil acts they have done in the world; instead it says that no matter what you have done up to that point in your life, you are still free to choose heaven while you are on earth.
Does the Lord Condemn?
There is one last question I want to explore: if the Lord says in Luke “Do not judge,” does God himself obey His own rule? Or is it a situation where an authority figure like a parent or a teacher says, “You can’t break this rule, but I can”—like a police officer who gives tickets for speeding, but when there is a criminal to catch, he can go as fast as he wants? Is God saying, “Judging and condemnation is my job; you are not good enough to do it”? The book of Psalms is full of expressions like “God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day” (Psalm 7) and “It is God who judges; He brings one down, he exalts another” (Psalm 75) and “He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead and crushing the rulers of the whole earth” (Psalm 110). Does God judge, or is that just the human perspective of David, who wrote the Psalms?
I think so. And I take comfort in that passage from Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven, where it says that God is “mercy itself and goodness itself. Mercy itself and goodness itself could never condemn anyone.” We humans may have problems with inconsistency and hypocrisy, but God does not – God cannot hate, because it is contradictory to His very nature. The next sentence goes on to say, “It is we who condemn ourselves, because we reject his goodness.”
So that brings the question back to us. It is not just that we should not condemn others: we should also not condemn ourselves. Or, to put it another way, we should not choose hell. How can we not condemn ourselves? By using the same three tools I already talked about. Seek to understand yourself better – which is a lifelong task, because none of us knows ourselves fully and completely. And yes, examining yourself may lead you to look into the dark corners of your soul, where you may not like everything you see. But that is the beginning of the repentance process, so have no fear. If you see sin inside yourself, do not worry that it means eternal damnation, but instead think of the phrase “forgiveness of sins,” and start the course correction. And if it seems overwhelming, remember that your freedom of choice will always be protected – you can always choose heaven.
Can you live a life without judgment? Yes, the Lord is saying, you can. But it will not be a simple thing; it will be a lifelong process. The thing about tornadoes is that they are rare, and most people don’t get much practice dealing with them. But the impulse to judge others comes up frequently, so we can get practice every single day in learning how to respond to it. When you feel judgement of others leaping into your mind, you can even be grateful for another opportunity to free yourself from that prison. Each time you leave judgement behind, you take another step toward heaven, a place where no one judges anyone.
READINGS
Old Testament reading: Psalm 34:19-22
The righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all; he protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken. Evil will slay the wicked; the foes of the righteous will be condemned. The Lord will rescue his servants; no one who takes refuge in him will be condemned.
New Testament reading: Luke 6:35-38
Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Reading from Emanuel Swedenborg: Secrets of Heaven 2335(3)
The Lord never judges anyone from anything but goodness. He wants to raise everyone into heaven, without exception. In fact, if he could, he would lift us all right up to his own level. The Lord, you see, is mercy itself and goodness itself. Mercy itself and goodness itself could never condemn anyone. It is we who condemn ourselves, because we reject his goodness. Just as we had fled from goodness during bodily life, we flee from it in the other life, and consequently we flee from heaven and the Lord as well. The Lord, after all, can dwell only in goodness. He dwells in truth, too, but not in truth that is detached from goodness. He himself tells us in John that he does not damn anyone, or in other words, judge anyone to hell:
God did not send his Son into the world so that he could judge the world but so that the world could be saved by him. (John 3:17)
