condemn

Drosophila melanogaster – the common fruitfly

Once upon a time… I used to pull the heads off flies.

Excuses:

I was only following orders.
I did it for the “greater good”.
I was swift, steady, gentle, and merciful
They were very small flies, (fruitflies, gnats, no-see-ums, the kind of fly we wipe off the back of our necks on a warm summer evening on the porch).

Biology pre-med major… lots of bio lab courses… histology… genetics… experimenting with fruit flies. Breeding them. Then, measuring them. Anesthetizing a tube of dozens, sprinkling a few out, grasping one with forceps and placing it (the size of a gnat… a no-see-um) on my slide, separating the head from the body carefully to preserve the salivary glands intact, applying stain and solvent then a cover slip to the glass slide, and putting it under the microscope (that had a grid, and measurement scales on it), to measure and classify the results.

Jesus had brought these memories back to me with crystal clarity. He focused, minutely, on the diligence, the care I would take, my hands… steady and careful, my eyes… obsessed with getting just the accurate count of hairs (or whatever criterion evaluated)… the care to focus perfectly… to standardize my scales properly… then notate my results without error. He reminded me of my intensity to attain perfection in this! (For I was very dedicated, indeed.)

What had brought this memory about? What was Jesus teaching me at the time?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One Saturday afternoon a couple years ago… I was reviewing some notes on The Lord’s Prayer and Sermon on the Mount. Suddenly these verses stopped me, amplified, and would not let go of me…

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. ²For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you…” [Matthew 7]

(I’m sure you’ve known such moments from time to time.) And the Lord was present, and intense. Not angry… not at all… just… well, “intense” is the only word I can find. It was clear, He was “teaching”… “renewing”… “transforming”… and I just had to hold still and “hear Him… wait Him out… let Him ‘speak’ into my heart in such a way that He accomplished His purpose”. (I wish I had better words for such moments. They happen seldom, and they are “cosmic” in impact, and I’ve never found the right language to wrap around them, because they are “wordless” moments. All I could do was “wait” and “attend”.)

Don’t “judge”… (And I DO this… all the time… so STOP IT!) That simple!

I mean, really… how simple is that? God said.. “Don’t judge, Little Monk. It’s above your pay grade. It’s not your role. It’s not your right. When you do it, you bring judgment upon yourself! Just… just… DON’T!”

How SIMPLE is that?

And yet… and yet… I’ve done it every day of my life, since I was old enough to… probably about 3 years old or so. At LEAST every day, no doubt every HOUR, sometimes for hours on end! Pride is, and has ever been, my besetting sin. I was raised this way. I was raised “proud”, and “elitist”. I was raised constantly to “keep score”… grades, popularity, wealth, intelligence, social standing, uprightness. Later this translated into piety, dedication, holiness, even servanthood. (How ironic is that? To keep a “pride meter” going on how “humble” you are?! Nonetheless, it can be done, trust me on that!)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After ruthlessly showing me my ongoing failure to overcome my sin of judging, Jesus had rolled that “instant replay video” of the “white lab-coated me” before my eyes. Reaching out for my specimens, examining them, measuring them, drawing my conclusions, making my notes.

He likened all of that to “judging”, and said that across my whole life, I had tried to overcome my sin of judging by trying to rid myself of my methodical diligence. I’d tried to learn not to tear apart the bug. Not to stain the glands. Not to mount the slide. Not to measure the outcome. Not to notate the results… I tried to “unlearn diligence”, thinking I was “doing right”. And, He concluded, rather matter-of-factly… I’d failed. My whole life, I had tried to correct this sin this way, and failed. Not utterly… I’d succeeded in muddling the process up to now. He said I’d made some progress… I no longer came up with my “quantitative result”, and I never ever “wrote the results down in my notes” anymore. Good show! But…

But… I had missed His point entirely. “The sin,” Jesus said, “is not in the means you use to measure and evaluate the specimen. The sin, is in believing that you have a ‘specimen to evaluate’ in the first place! Your sin of judgment isn’t in how you treat the fly to measure it. Your sin is in ‘seeing a fly’ and reaching for it at all!

“Don’t you see, Little Monk? Your judging isn’t in ‘HOW you answer the question of another’s worth’. You sin by judging when you think you have the right to ASK the question at all! From that point on, you’ve violated their sacredness, and all the rest is just a matter of degree.

“I’m not telling you just to quit measuring and evaluating everything. I’m telling you to stop even asking the question, even framing the thought, or allowing your mind to reach out to anyone or anything else to ‘evaluate’… beyond simply distinguishing or identifying it, him, or her.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It took me a while, Gentle Reader, even to UNDERSTAND what He was saying. Wondrously, He almost seemed to “still time” for me, for a number of hours to grapple with my own “hardness of heart and head”, until I could SEE, I could HEAR, what He was saying here. When at last I did…

When finally I did… I was horrified. I DID see, I DID hear. And it horrified me. I got it. Now, to make a long story short, having now embraced this conviction, I renounced it, and tried to resolve never to do this again.

But you know what? I failed. For hours I tried… until I realized that it was as if there were “gridlines” in my very eyes. For me to THINK about anyone, anything, ideas, positions, opinions, people… was for me REFLEXIVELY to evaluate them… reach out and grasp them, define their “edges”, and then “measure them” according to my own criteria and judge them, good/bad, like/don’t like, right/wrong, want/don’t want… on and on without pause or reflection. I tried, for several hours I tried… and failed dismally. I could not stop myself.

I wondered why? I asked Him why? Where had I learned this? Why was this so deeply a part of how I even LOOK AT things, let alone think about them? Where did I pick this up, that I could learn to “put it down”? How could I “unlearn” this?

The Lord was gracious enough to respond…

“It is in you from the beginning. It is part of Original Sin. It IS the original sin of Eve. The Serpent posed her a proposition, a different view of God’s will, and she BOUGHT IT. That there was some ‘conceivable good’, some good thing, some advantage available to her and Adam, that was outside of and contrary to, the will of God. She conceived the possibility that God’s mind and words held something less than their utter, and absolute, good. She ‘tested this hypothesis’, and ‘measured’… looking upon the fruit and measuring it against three criteria of her choice… that it was a delight to the eyes, good for food, and desirable to make one wise. She MEASURED, then concluded, decided, and acted.

“Your drive to do this, Little Monk, is a part of your very DNA, your legacy from Adam and Eve.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now… I want to do something unusual here.

I am going to stop. I will offer “my” conclusion to this post tomorrow (Lord, willing). But this was a very VERY “experiential” moment of prayer in my life. I want to invite you, Gentle Reader, to experiment on your own.

No, don’t go pulling the heads off fruitflies, or anything else. But take a few minutes, see if you “judge” as regularly as you see me convicted of here, see if after a few minutes you can “Get it”, as I struggled to do…

It’s not… murder, but anger… not adultery, but lust after another…. not measuring, but asking… “Sin”, as Jesus would have us avoid it, is not in “what we DO to others”, but how we “LOOK UPON others”. That was a tough, tough realization for me.

Jesus gave me time. Quiet time. To hear, to ponder, to consider His words, to look at scripture, to see those words… before He concluded this episode and lesson for me.

So, I want to give YOU time as well. Consider all this, “look upon Your Rose” with all this, and let the Holy Spirit speak into your own heart. Then come back, and see whether you and I come to the same, or similar places.

This has a happy ending, I assure you. It may surprise you, or it may not, but it’s nothing to shrink away from… truly. No pain here, no guilt, shame… in fact… how Jesus dealt with THAT may actually make you laugh.

Meet you here tomorrow, Good Lord willin’ an’ the creek don’ rise (as my mother used to say)…

Blessings and grace to thee, Gentle Reader! — The Little Monk

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,

that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

This verse is so popular, it has, perhaps become one of the most quoted verses in the Western hemisphere. During the 2011 Super Bowl, one Christian foundation attempted to buy an ad that had John 3:16 as its focus, but the ad was rejected. To this day, people hold up signs around televised football stadiums that simply say, “John 3:16.” You can find the chapter and verse on bumper stickers, necklaces and bracelets. You can even buy it on a refrigerator magnet. But has all this mania cheapened the message.

And have we become so focused on that verse as a slick mantra we’ve conveniently forgotten the context in which the verse was said and the verse that directly follows?

Nicodemus, a leading Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus at night to speak with him privately. The Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees, believed in resurrection, an afterlife, and in the coming of a Messiah. His first statement to Jesus confirms his respect and belief in Jesus.

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

Jesus intentionally confirms to Nicodemus he has been born again; Nicodemus doesn’t see it yet.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Jesus, with compassion and love, takes the time to explain to Nicodemus in detail how this can be so, ending with, “whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

And here are the two verses together (emphasis mine):

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” (John 3:16-17)

The Greek word used for judge is krino, which means to judge, call to account, vindicate, condemn.

Well, if God did not send Jesus into the world to judge, then who am I to judge? Who am I to call to account? Who am I to seek revenge? Who am I to condemn? Shame on me if I do!

Now, lest you think I’m ignoring what else Jesus says, here is how he completes his thought to Nicodemus that night:

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their actions were evil. All those who do wrong fear coming to the Light because their actions will be exposed. But whoever does the right thing comes to the Light because those things – those thoughts, those words, those actions – have been carried out through God. (John 3:18-21)

So let’s examine what Jesus says here.

Whoever does not believe is condemned already. Well, we know Jesus didn’t condemn them because Jesus only does the will of our Father, and clearly, “God did not send the Son into the world to judge (condemn) the world.” Who did? It must be God. So if God has already condemned, it would be superfluous for us to do so, and certainly an insult for us to do God’s job.

And this is the judgment: Wow! Did you actually read this? The Light – Jesus – has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light. The judgment is that people choose darkness instead of the Light. This is the hell of one’s own making – to fear coming to the Light because their actions will be exposed.

This, to me, is profound. We never need to point fingers at anyone. We never need to tell anyone they are going to hell. Many are already there; and the many include those of us who call ourselves Christians. And we need to look deeply into our own hearts before we ever accuse, judge or condemn anyone else.

Our own actions, words and thoughts are exposed every day.

“Truly, I say to you, as you did to one of the least of these, you did to me.” (Matthew 25:40)

“I’m giving you a new commandment: Love each other in the same way that I have loved you. Everyone will know you are my disciples because of your love for each other.” (John 13:34-35)

Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?”

“No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “But seventy times seven.” (Matthew 18:21-22)

And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” (Mark 8:34)

“But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you; (Luke 6:27)