A woman once brought her son to visit the famous Mahatma Gandhi, in India, who was revered as a wise and holy man. She asked him to tell her son to give up candy, as he was totally addicted to it. Gandhi told her to come back in three weeks. So she returned three weeks later. Then Gandhi said to her son, ‘You should give up all this candy, it is going to damage your health!’ The woman was puzzled and asked him why he hadn’t said that three weeks before. He told her that he was also addicted to candy, and so he had to give it up himself before he could tell her son to do it.
‘Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.’ (Matt 6:37)
That has to be understood correctly. It is normal to judge a person’s actions. If someone murders another, it is morally wrong. If someone abuses another person, sexually, or in any other way, it is morally wrong and we can judge such actions as right or wrong and we should be accountable for our actions. The judgement God tells us not to make is the judgement of the heart. We cannot judge the heart of the person who did something like that, because only God can judge the heart. We don’t know what causes someone to act the way they do. I suspect that if we could see what goes on in the heart of each other, we would be a lot more merciful with one another.
When I was in the seminary I visited a man in prison over two years. We actually visited them in their cells. He had committed a very brutal murder, which was a chance meeting and a provoked attack. 30 seconds either way and he would never have met the person. He actually turned himself in, as he couldn’t live with what had happened. The media called him a monster and a cold blooded killer, etc. Visiting him in prison showed me a man who was deeply remorseful for what had happened. He prayed for the woman he had killed and her family. He wasn’t a monster. He was a person who had made a terrible mistake.
I remember watching an episode of First 48, where they follow real murder cases and how the police try and solve them. One such murder was committed by a man who had been introduced to crime by his father at the age of 6. He would bring his son to drug deals with him, at the age of 6. One of the detectives who had caught him acknowledged that he never had a chance. Even she could see the tragedy of his background which resolved in him getting more and more involved in crime and not surprisingly eventually in a murder.
The greatest knowledge we can gain, is self-knowledge. The more we are able to look at ourselves honestly, the less likely we are to be over-critical of others. If we are honest with ourselves, none of us are in a position to judge the heart of anyone else and yet we do it all the time. It is hard for us to distinguish between the actions of another and their heart. We tend to judge the person rather than their actions. If you turn it around, how would you feel if people only judged you as a person, rather than by your actions. You know the way we do things and then are frustrated with ourselves, because we know we can do better, but our own weakness pulls us down.
In one of the parishes where I worked, an elderly lady went into a room for a meeting. In that room a carpenter was doing some work. She lost her temper with him and threatened to throw out his tools etc. Her reaction was completely out of proportion to what was going on. As it happened I turned up a few minutes later, although it had nothing to do with what had just happened, but I realized she felt I was judging her. I knew that because the next time she came to me for Communion she had her head down; she wouldn’t look at me in the face. I felt the Lord saying to me, ‘You see the shame this woman feels because of her own weakness. Perhaps this is a temper she cannot control and it causes her great humiliation.’ It would be easy to write her off as a cantankerous old woman, without giving any consideration to the fact that maybe this is a weakness that she doesn’t have much control over and that causes her much grief. We cannot judge the heart.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that the only thing we can really take credit for, are our sins. Maybe that seems a bit extreme, but think about it. Everything we have comes from God: our gifts, talents, opportunities, health, ability, intelligence, chance for education etc. To recognize that also helps to bring humility.
Humility is not pretending you are stupid when you know you aren’t, rather knowing what we are like before God. In other words, humility is truth. We are small and we are sinners, but that’s ok, because the Lord loves us as we are. The more aware of this we are, the less likely we are to only see what is wrong with the people around us. Unconsciously we tend to think that if we could sort out the people around us, the world would be a better place. But what the Lord tells us is to focus on ourselves and then the world will start to become a better place.
When I am in traffic and someone cuts me off, or does something that scares me, I usually react like most of people and get angry with the person, calling them all kinds of words that aren’t in the bible. But then I try to stop myself and ask myself if I have ever done anything similar? because of course I have. That usually gets me to calm down. The truth is that they are not the idiot that I just called them. They are someone who made an error in judgement. We all do it, all the time. If we didn’t, there wouldn’t be any crashes on the road. The Sheriff’s department in Lee County have actually set up a taskforce to deal with road-rage, because it has gotten so bad. The rage within people has little to do with the traffic and incidents on the road. It is just a rage that people have within them, which is triggered by some traffic incident. If people were prepared to look at their own mistakes a bit more, there would probably be a lot less road rage, because we would realize that we are no better than most other people on the road. If I can only see the fault of the other, then I am less likely to be tolerant. IF I can acknowledge my own weakness, it will probably make me slower to condemn.
‘Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? Remove the wooden beam from your eye first… Then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.’
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