Can you let a moment pass without assigning a category to it? Good or bad. Better or worse. Like or dislike. Appropriate or not appropriate. Wise or foolish. In bounds or out of bounds. Can you behold a work of art and not jump straight to “I like it” or “I don’t like it”? Can you witness your neighbor’s behavior, work, marriage, parenting, and habits and think… nothing at all? Can you observe your neighbor struggling to keep it together without diagnosing them?
Stop judging each other, Jesus says (Matthew 7:1-5). Stop measuring each other, analyzing each other, diagnosing each other. And imagine a church in which every person, long time member or first time visitor, can say, I never sense that judging, measuring gaze from someone else, and yet I feel 100% seen.
Is it possible for such a church to exist? “The one who hears my words and puts them into practice is like a wise man who builds his house on a solid foundation that will withstand any storm (7:24-25) Yes, Jesus seems to think it perfectly reasonable for us to actually put this non-judgmental love into practice.
By challenging us to drop our desire to judge, to tend to the log in one’s own eye instead of the speck of dust in the neighbor’s eye, Jesus is inviting us to participate in the life of the God who is free. He is free of the need to judge and diagnose us. He sees us, all our work and behavior and mistakes, and has no impulse to cram us into categories of good or bad, better or worse, like or dislike, appropriate or not appropriate, wise or foolish, in bounds or out of bounds. He loves us without any need to judge us. He is free.
That freedom is quite open to us. But as long as we insist on judging, we are slaves to those we judge. We are their slaves because we’re giving them a power they didn’t even ask for – the power to steal and occupy our brain space, the power to seize and extract our mental and spiritual energies, the power to shackle us to the exhausting task of being the almighty judge for everyone else. This indeed is slavery. But Jesus, if we’ll let him, is making us free of the need to judge and label each other, free of the need to weigh each other against ourselves, free of the burden of having to decide what’s in bounds and out of bounds. Jesus is making us such peaceful people that we can behold one another’s lives, relationships, behaviors, and mistakes and think… nothing. Jesus is releasing us from the burden of having to be each other’s judges, freed instead to simply be with each other.
In the Gospels, people swarm Jesus because this is exactly what he does. He sees their secrets and their bad habits. He sees the past that they’re so ashamed of and their broken relationships. And instead of passing one or another kind of judgment on them, he simply invites them to the table for a meal and is present with them. In his presence, people know they are 100% seen and 0% judged.
The life of following Jesus is the life of relinquishment. Since the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, we’ve been relinquishing our anger, our stress, our misplaced desires, our grudges, and our insecurities about how we appear to others. And now we’re relinquishing each other, letting go of the burden of being each other’s judge. How does it feel to have that weight lifted?