Judge Not

 

Doctrine of Healing

“Doctrine is to be the balm of a healing experience of God, not a theological scalpel to wound and exclude people.”

Diana Butler Bass

          In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonished his followers, “Judge not lest you be judged.” (Matt. 7:1) That one line of scripture has been used and misused ever since. Theologian and scholar, Stewart Weber explains the meaning of if this way: “Do not judge others until you are prepared to be judged by the same standard. And then, when you exercise judgement toward others, do it with humility.” (Holman New Testament Commentary, Vol.1, p. 96)

          Recently a friend told me about a conversation she had with a woman, a conservative Christian, who insisted that we are here to judge one another. According to her, “those people” are bound for hell, and it’s our job to let them know they have an option. When my friend Andy died two years ago, I was told by his next-door neighbor that his soul was bound for hell because he would not claim Jesus as his lord and savior. For my part, neither one of these is true nor valid. Jesus’ ministry was not about condemning people but healing them and demonstrating what compassion looks like.

          The admonition for us would be to mind our own business. Today, the huge conversation is about gender fluidity. Judging whether someone should be allowed to change their gender, or to claim a non-gender identity, and whether they should still be treated as a regular human being if they do. State legislatures are wildly passing laws meant to control other people’s bodies. This is no different from deciding that kidnapped Africans could be sold as slaves and counted as non-humans, or at least only 2/3’s human. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

What someone chooses to do about their own gender is no one’s business but their own. Yes, it takes some getting used to, and it’s awkward when genders, pronouns, and names change. When we first started doing organ transplants there was a similar uproar, and when we started stem-cell research, an even bigger upheaval. Now with sex-change surgeries, the public believes it has a perfect right to weigh in, and while we’re at it, ban a few dozen books that offend us from school libraries. The most outrageous part of this judgment is believing it’s a righteous thing to do—the moral thing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

          There is no moral high-ground here—only personal choice and personal privacy. Judgements pile up and eventually come crashing down in the form of karmic debt. We are a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-theological country. Every American has the same rights and privileges under the constitution. When we begin picking and choosing who has rights and who doesn’t, we’re in trouble and we’re no longer America. If we love our freedom, we must love other people’s freedom too.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane