Who Judges And When?

Friday of the Twenty-Second Week in Course 2024

Living in the kind of highly polarized society we have today, one must be uncommonly careful about what you say to others, or even what your face does when you are interacting with another person. Suppose they were talking to you about what they did an evening or two ago. You cough or make a tiny face and then you are likely to get a retort: “You have no business judging me. Wasn’t it your Jesus who said, “judge not, lest ye be judged.”? I frankly believe that line from Matthew 7 is the most memorized Bible quote in history, or at least the one most frequently misused as a weapon.

St. Paul may be referring to that passage as he writes to the Corinthian church. From what we know from the history of Corinth and its environs, as well as from Paul’s letters, Corinth might have been the most litigious area he preached to. There seemed to be some kind of verbal or physical confrontation going on all the time in the city. Paul is trying to step back a bit from the current controversy about church leadership, assuring his readers that he knows leaders are merely stewards of the Gospel, and need to be trustworthy. His words should assure us. Jesus is the only valid judge of anyone’s life or authority or stewardship. Only He can shed light on the nuances of every human judgement, and He will do that either when He returns in glory to judge everyone, or when each of us dies and renders a report on our gifts and thoughts and actions. Before that, one human can judge only his own actions.

As the psalmist adds, the Lord loves justice. In the end, righteousness will be rewarded, and the unjust will be cut off from eternal life. The Lord will separate sheep from goats, and will care for the sheep. The goats will, on the other hand, end up as cabrito for Satan and his minions.

St. Luke then relates a kind of parable, answering indirectly the challenge somebody posed to Him and His disciples. John the Baptist had already been murdered by Herod Antipas some months earlier, but there were still disciples of John, probably in little communities all over the area. Some of them, of course, were following Jesus. But their practices were different. John’s community was used to lots of prayer and fasting, likely because of their strict Essene doctrines. (Essenes were like early Jewish monks, using prayer and fasting as they awaited the coming of Mashiah.) But Jesus and His disciples ate and drank more than John’s. (That probably echoed Jesus’s admonition that the wedding guests could not fast while the Bridegroom was present, and that Jesus was indeed the Bridegroom-Messiah.) Jesus, however, was not ready to get into that discussion. John’s people were stuck in the Essene interpretation of the OT. Jesus had a different approach, a kind of new wineskin for just-harvested grapes—disciples with different backgrounds. So just as one would not pour newly crushed wine grapes into an old, crinkly wineskin, lest the whole combination be ruined, so the new assembly, the Church Jesus was founding, could not exist in thrall to the old ways of observance.

Jesus kept focusing His disciples and anyone who would listen on what is really important in religion, and we need to learn from that. We need to love God and worship him in spirit and truth, and love our neighbor, even enemies, just as God does.