Midweek Lent, 2024 + Love One Another + Week 3: Do Not Judge One Another
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Texts: Matthew 7:1-5; Romans 14:7-13
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
This is a hard one.
If loving one another as Jesus commands involves not judging others, a lot of us will struggle with that. Jesus’ words about ignoring a log in your eye while seeing the speck in your neighbor’s eye have become common cultural imagery for a reason. Humans can be pretty judgey with each other.
And our judging of each other, no matter how light or great, is a stumbling block to truly loving another person. Non-judging takes discipline, effort, attention, because it’s in our nature to do it.
But if we, with the Spirit’s help, can unlearn that nature, that habit, we’ll find a depth of love for each other, and even for ourselves, we previously couldn’t imagine.
But let’s get one thing out of the way at the start.
This isn’t a command to ignore evil and sin. No one says we shouldn’t name evil, or work as hard as we can against it. No one says that if I sin you can’t call me on that, and I don’t need to confess it. That’s not the judging Paul and Jesus are talking about.
Our lives as Christ seek the good, seek to be loving and gracious in this world, seek to bear the heart of God. If there is evil in us, if we’ve sinned, we confess it to each other, ask forgiveness of those we’ve wronged, and of God, so our lives can flourish.
Jesus and Paul aren’t saying ignore all that: just look at the majority of their other teachings. This is a different thing.
See, the problem is hardly anyone ever is exactly like me or you.
When we’re young, we assume everyone thinks like us, cares about what we do, has the same interests. Pretty quickly we learn there are differences, but mostly as children we gravitate toward people like us. And that’s really hard if you’re the outlier in your own family.
As we become adults we learn just how diverse and different other people are. Some never mature enough to accept that, and spend their whole lives trying to be in a group that thinks the same, looks the same, acts the same. We see the sickness of this deeply infecting our national political life. But if we do mature, we begin to rejoice in differences, find them critical to the beauty of life and the world.
That’s what Jesus and Paul are commanding us to do, to mature into this way.
So this is the challenge: can you love without judging?
That means, can you love someone not in spite of their differences, or what you might see as flaws, but because of them? It’s a huge difference.
Loving someone “in spite of” their differences is barely better than dismissing them. You discount a piece of this person and say “I love you anyway.” Thanks, but no thanks. That’s not love.
Imagine that you just don’t care for people with blue eyes, or maybe people who talk fast. It’s irrational, but all such judging is. So, if someone in this community has blue eyes or talks fast, and you said, “I love you as a sibling in Christ, in spite of your eyes,” or, “I love you in spite of how you talk,” how do you think that would be received?
We generally judge in two categories. We all have flaws, we all make mistakes that aren’t sin, we all have personality traits and habits, and so on, things that bother people; and we also all have things innate to us that someone can dislike or even despise. And Paul and Jesus say that loving each other means not judging any of those things. It means loving others for those things, not in spite of them.
The most obvious category today is our innate differences.
The list is familiar: race, orientation, ethnicity, gender, and so on. These differences are deeply divisive in our society. Tolerance is usually urged as a way to deal with them.
But the command Jesus and Paul give is to move beyond mere tolerance into full love. Into non-judging. To love each other because of these innate differences, to appreciate and enjoy and admire the differences. That’s the challenge. To love the other as the other is, not in spite of who the other is.
The other category is more complicated.
Jesus tells me to take care of the log in my own eye before I judge the speck in your eye. To deal with my own flaws and mistakes and problems. These aren’t like our innate differences, but they’re deeply part of us. That means you also have a log in your eye, according to Jesus.
These logs may be the personality traits that bother others, or the habits that annoy others, or the ways of thinking that anger others. They may be the way I handle crises or the way you handle being sad, the way your neighbor copes with life or the way you take care of your business. We all have things that are different from each other that may or may not be fixable but are part of us. Some of us are working on them, some are not.
But the command is that I don’t judge you for these things, and you don’t judge me. You are worthy of being loved with your flaws and mistakes and your being annoying to others. Not in spite of these, but because they make you who you are, and me who I am. Without these, you’re not you, I’m not me.
Christian love is to see each other, flaws and all, and love each other for these things. And maybe learn to love yourself even as you work on your mistakes and weird annoying habits.
Paul says this love is possible, this non-judging, because of Christ’s love.
All that divided his Roman congregation lived under the embracing love that they knew in Christ. We don’t live to ourselves, Paul says, and we don’t die to ourselves – we live and die in Christ’s love.
And Christ loves you as you are, fully, flaws and all, innate differences and all. Not in spite of them. You are God’s precious child, full stop. No exceptions. No conditions.
So now you are free to look at your neighbor with the same eyes of love. Because all that makes them who they are, even things you don’t like, is what makes them real and true. And you are loved by Christ, as they are loved by Christ. So you also are to love each other.
Without judging. Logs and all.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
