I have a mixed relationship with “Judge not, lest you be judged.”
Whenever I hear it my antenna goes up, listening intently for how someone is about to tell me that they don’t have to listen to what the rest of the Bible says about how Christians should act since Jesus tells us we’re not supposed to judge anyone. I typically assume that Paul is about to take a beating.
But every now and then it comes back around on me, and I realize that those are life-giving words–not merely for individuals, but for communities. Here’s my latest struggle with it.
I’ve been questioning the value of certain scholars’ work recently. Not that it’s not scholarly and to the point, but I’ve been made cautious because these Christian scholars who have written at length on forgiveness, reconciliation, and sex have had their own marriages end.
I feel a need to know what happened. I feel a need to know how their lives do or do not reflect what they’ve spoken about with such authority in their books. I find myself hesitating about the value of their work because of the lives that don’t serve as glowing endorsements.
If all goes well, it does begin to dawn on me that I don’t know these people at all, not only do I not know the circumstances behind the writing, but I also do not know the circumstances behind the divorce. There is no context of community within which I might wrestle with them, listen to them, and have sufficient exposure to who they are that their personal “witness” begins to regain (or to lose) its credibility.
As the thought process continues, I realize that I have friends who are divorced and remarried, and that in the context of a relationship where I know them, at times worship with them, and otherwise spend time in community with them, I never hear them differently due to their marital status.
I listen to them, honor them, and respect them because we have built a relationship of trust even though both our lives are marked with decisions that we and the other might regard as unwise or unholy.
And so I come full circle to the initial impulse to judge these divorcees who should have been able to avoid it if they were living according to what they wrote in their books. And I am reminded of the stern warning: do not judge, lest you be judged.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I am even able to stop there and let it all go. But if not, there’s always the threat that someone might turn the tables on me and ask me how well I’m doing by the standards I set in my own writing. If I dog these folks for lives that imperfectly mirror the beauty of the gospel as they have been able to see it and articulate it in writing, what will become of me when someone uses my own writing as the canon by which my own life is judged?
I once read a pastor’s narrative in which he was reflecting on his call, especially preaching. He reflected on people calling the preacher a hypocrite for what he says in the pulpit in juxtaposition to the pastor’s imperfect life. But his own feeling was that it was in the pulpit he was his truest self.
I think those of us who write about biblical and theological things can resonate with that. Or, at least, with the idea that in our writing we see more clearly than we might reflect in our everyday lives where old patterns and powers overwhelm us again and again. The failure of the life to live up to the text is not simply the reality of our lives stacked up against the Jesus of the Bible, it’s the reality of our lives when stacked up against the Jesus upon whose ways we reflect in our books.
We will continue to fall short. We will continue to need grace.
And, I think we’re still free to read each other’s books.
