Loving and Judging

"Everyone thinks you’re a brat.”

My older sister dropped that bomb on me a couple months into seventh grade. Her friend, cool and confident, was there to back her up.

“Yeah, it’s true.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. I acted surprised but I knew what they were talking about. I had been feeling a new confidence lately, like I could say or do anything and people would like me for it. It’s hard to imagine someone in hand-me-down jean overalls feeling the right to be sassy, but I did.

But as soon as she said those words to me, the illusion in my head that everyone was happy with me evaporated. I realized I wasn’t being confident; I was being arrogant. My sass wasn’t cute. It was annoying.

As badly as it stung, Emily’s rebuke was a necessary course correction for me. It helped put in place an internal check on my attitude that, to this day, will sometimes sound the alert to let me know I’m being a brat and need to snap out of it.

Still, she could have been nicer about it. My love language is words of affirmation, so critical words cut me especially deeply. Throughout our childhood and teen years, my sister spoke many such “rebukes” to me. Like any other human, she sometimes spoke critical words to me not from a place of genuine concern for me and astute observance of my heart, but from anger, jealousy, or indifference. Those words I had to learn to dismiss.

Update: We both got over our teenaged selves. Adult Emily is legitimately one of the top few most affirming, supportive, affectionate people in my life. I don’t think she has spoken a harsh word to me since 2003.

I share this story as an example of one of the rare occasions on which truthful, critical—judgmental—words accomplished something good.

Because that’s one of the big questions many of us are working through right now, isn’t it? What is judging? What is loving? Are there times when kind words are destructive and harsh words are loving?

What Does Judging Mean?

There’s the obvious sense of the word, where you’re like, “You are bad for doing that and I am better than you because I don’t do that.” We pretty much all agree that that kind of judging is wrong. It goes a big, ugly, nasty step further than simply disagreeing with someone’s choices.

But what about simply disagreeing with someone’s choices? Is that judging?

Technically, it is. “Judge” in its most literal sense means to assess or evaluate. We all constantly judge what is happening around us, decide if it’s good or bad, decide if we want to participate in it or not. And we should! Please, let’s keep our brains and hearts turned on.

What about that middle ground? Disagreeing with someone’s choices, and telling him so, but not believing that you are better than him because you’re making a different choice. Is that judging? If we’re sticking with our literal definition, it is. But is it ugly, nasty judging?

This is a hard question.

If you’ve ever been a part of a Christian culture where confronting people about their sin is highly valued, you know how badly that can go. You know that “confronting” is usually just a Biblical-sounding cover for shaming someone about an area in which you happen to be doing better than her at the moment.

So how do we do it right?

Tweezers and Peroxide

Jesus gives us his holy paradigm for judging in Matthew 7:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

How do we offer correction that is both loving and truthful? How do we help our brothers and sisters see clearly? Jesus emphasizes removing the plank from your own eye—dealing with your own sin first and most severely, and that’s what we should emphasize, too. In one of many quotable lines from her book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, Rosaria Butterfield says, “Who else [besides a Christian] knows that the sin that will undo me is my own, not my neighbor’s, no matter how big my neighbor’s sin may appear?”

Assuming we are constantly on guard to remove our own planks (which I realize is not a safe assumption, but we’ll make it anyway for the sake of continuing the conversation), what do we make of the second part of Jesus’s instruction? A friend of mine, when she reads this passage, is reminded of when her kids climb the fence and inevitably get splinters in their hands and feet. How does she remove those splinters, those specks?

Gently, carefully, lovingly. She knows if that splinter isn’t removed, it will fester and make her child miserable. She is also aware of how much the removal hurts. She makes sure her hands are clean before she starts. She gives him a reassuring hug when she’s finished. Her kids trust her to enough to sit through the pain of having a splinter removed because she has a history of healing and helping them.

Another friend of mine works closely with kids who are from backgrounds that put them at risk for all kinds of things—dropping out of school, depression, food insecurity, prison, and more. Part of being a friend and a mentor to these kids is teaching them to make their own good choices. That teaching necessarily involves discipline and correction.

But my friend has learned that it does not work to simply give an instruction and then give a consequence when that instruction is violated. Not because these kids are exceptionally bad kids, but because they are often lacking a most critical foundation—acceptance—that must be in place before discipline can be effective. At a recent training she attended, my friend learned to think of this concept as “connection before correction.”

I think at-risk kids aren’t much different from all of us in this respect.

Correction falls on deaf ears unless it comes from someone who is connected to us, someone we know for a fact, based on their history with us, cares deeply about us.

Jesus talks about “brothers” in the Matthew 7 passage. Conventionally, “brothers” in the Bible means other believers, other people who have said they want to follow Jesus. This log-and-speck paradigm gives us really good direction for correcting people whom we love and know well, who have agreed together to watch out for each other and bring each other back to Jesus when we stray.

When The Very Foundations of Society are At Stake

But what about when a person, or group of people, is seriously wrong? Like, they haven’t asked for your opinion at all but they are actively destroying people’s lives? Is it your job to intervene, to evaluate what is happening and try to do something about it?

Some of you are thinking, “Yeah, what do I do about all those people who say they are Christians but are telling our children that being gay is okay?”

Some of you are thinking, “Yeah, what do I do about all those people who say they are Christians but voted for Trump?”

What do we do about them?

Sometimes the distinction between brother and enemy is very, very fuzzy.

Jesus, knowing that we often confuse one for the other, gives us a plan for dealing with both.

“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons [and daughters] of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men.” Luke 6:35

and the parallel passage from Matthew 5:

“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons [and daughters] of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Matthew 5:44-45

Who are enemies? There are lots of opinions about what Jesus meant by “enemies” in this verse, but I think, for our purposes, we can boil it down to bad people who do bad things, particularly to you.

How does God handle enemies, these ungrateful and evil men?

He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men.

But God is not evil. Of course not. So does being kind to someone show agreement with them?

No.

Our human tendency is to believe that harshness, punishment, and condemnation are what cause people to turn from evil. We believe that kindness should be reserved for those who are good, who are doing things right, who are on our side.

God sent Jesus to correct that.

He says we will become children of God—that is, we will be of the same nature as God—when we love our enemies, do good to them, lend them our stuff and don’t care whether we get it back. He says that His is a kindness that leads to repentance.

In Jesus’s kingdom, kindness is not weakness. It is not endorsement, approval, or affiliation. It is simply the modus operandi for anyone who is like Jesus.

The Greek word for “kind” is chrestos and it is translated, alternatively, “good,” “easy,” and “gracious.”

Chrestos is not weakness, but neither is it assholery calling itself tough love.

Speaking To People, Not About People

I know there is more to it than being nice. I know even Jesus Himself harshly rebukes people. So what can we learn from Him about discerning when people need correction and doing it in love?

When we pay attention to who Jesus judges most harshly and why, we see that His rebukes are directed overwhelmingly at the Pharisees and scribes—the religious authorities of that time and place. Jesus rebukes them because they claimed to have a monopoly on knowing God and they condemned those who didn’t follow their rules.

This—who Jesus rebukes and why He rebukes them—is incredibly important. In fact, it’s so important that I’m not diving into here because it deserves a separate conversation.

Here I want to pay attention to the manner in which Jesus judged people.

Jesus’s interactions with people were always face to face. Whether extending great mercy or pronouncing a searing reproach, Jesus always knew exactly to whom He was speaking. He spoke with full recognition of people’s humanity.

Our platforms from which we so often pass judgment—whether social media or private gatherings or church pulpits—have allowed us to disconnect from the people we are judging. In these situations, it’s much easier to disregard someone’s soul, the image of God in them.

If you can wax philosophical about how the moral fabric of our society is being destroyed by the normalization of homosexuality when you are surrounded by straight people who agree with you, but the words stick in your throat when you’re talking to your gay son or daughter or uncle or niece, they’re probably the wrong words.

If you cannot say what you have to say to the Christian who voted for Trump while sitting with him, face to face, fully aware of his vulnerabilities, background, and good characteristics, then what you have to say to him is most likely the bad kind of judging.

I’m reminded of the Pharisee in Matthew 18, who spoke judgment on a tax collector who was within earshot:

“And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: ‘Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: “God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.”’”

Speaking judgment about someone and hoping they’ll hear you is not Jesus-style judging. It does not bring understanding, repentance, or change. It is done out of pride, fear, and utter disregard for the other person. It makes you a Pharisee.

Reconciling our strong convictions with words that are gracious enough to speak to someone’s face is no small task. Truly, it is no small task.

It will possibly, but not necessarily, require adjusting some of our strong convictions. It will require getting comfortable with speaking the truth, with pushing past your racing pulse and sweaty palms to get to the heart of a matter when it really matters. It will, most importantly, require us to adapt a counter-intuitive mindset that truly considers other people—all other people—as more important than ourselves.

Boycotting Boycotting

Despite the deep rivers of sin and dysfunction in the world today, I see some encouraging streams of culture running the other direction. Before the internet, it was much easier to shut ourselves off from people who differed greatly from us or made us feel uncomfortable. It’s harder to do that now. I think this exposure to each other has generated a redemptive movement toward greater understanding, acceptance, and respect of all people.

In secular culture, though—culture that does not acknowledge God as real—that understanding, acceptance, and respect bumps up against a hard stop when a person is too despicable. Thus the signs of political protesters declaring, “Tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance.”

I get it. I totally get it. In normal human life, sometimes you just have to say, “Nope. I will not stand for that. I hate it. I condemn it. I oppose it.”

I hate many things.

I hate the arrogant skepticism of atheists.

I hate the head-in-the-sand willful ignorance of religious people.

I hate loud, stinky, messy, crowded, neglected houses.

I hate perfect, fancy, insulated, overly quiet houses.

I hate parenting methods that produce bratty, self-centered, badly behaved children.

I hate parenting methods that produce docile, fearful, overly obedient children.

I hate the callousness, cruelty, and self-preserving mindset of those who claim racism isn’t a thing.

I hate the tunnel vision, bitterness, and victim mindset of those who claim racism is everything.

I hate the careless, untethered sexual ethic of secular society.

I hate the compartmentalized, shaming sexual ethic of church society.

I hate the exclusivity, the arrogance, the self-righteousness, and the lacking accountability of private schools.

I hate the overburden, the competing agendas, the unhealthy lunches, the chaos, and the bureaucracy of public schools.

I am actively opposed to all those things (and more!). I don’t want them influencing me or my family. Yet my world is composed precisely of atheists, religious people, stinky houses, perfect houses, badly behaved children, fearful children, calloused people, bitter people, careless sex, shameful sex, private schools, and public schools.

What’s more, if I look within my own heart, home, and life, I see so many of those characteristics I hate.

I can’t boycott it all. When I boycott one offensive element, I inadvertently lean hard into its equally offensive counterpart. I start explaining away the negative traits woven into my own patterns of behavior and ballooning the negative traits that aren’t a temptation for me. I become a Pharisee quicker than you can say “Never Trumper.”

Introspective humility aside, on a practical level, boycotting doesn’t work. If something is truly detestable to you, be assured you will not change it by stiff-arming it. You will simply discount yourself as credible to the people championing the thing you detest.

The beautiful way of Jesus, which is possible only by His power, offers us an option between full approval and utter disdain.

We enter the fray.

We become friends with our enemies.

We hold other people’s souls in higher esteem than the precarious scaffolding of ideology on which we’ve built our identity.

How do these theoretical injunctions play out in real life? I don’t know, exactly.

Paying attention to whom it is you feel judgy toward, for a start. Asking God to change your heart toward them. Getting to know them. Staying silent about certain things. Speaking up about other things. Asking yourself why behaviors or beliefs offend you. Asking people you trust to help you see the log in your own eye.

And that brings me to my final point.

When You Are the One Being Judged

Here is the truth: sometimes you are in the wrong. Like my bratty 12-year-old self from my opening story, we all behave like fools sometimes. It might be intentional or it might be unintentional. It might be an isolated incident, like speaking too rashly in an important conversation at work, or it might be a longstanding habit, like never getting your rent payment to your roommate on time.

If you aren’t paying attention to your own propensity to screw up, and dealing with it appropriately, someone else might have to step in and make you aware of the problem. Ideally it will be someone who cares about you and wisely, objectively speaks the truth to you. More likely, it will be the person you’ve hurt. They may or may not care about you, and they likely won’t be wise and objective about it, but they will speak the truth to you.

You then have a choice. You can be offended by it and point out all the ways that person has also screwed up, or you can accept it in humility. It’s not a self-demeaning humility that believes, “Oh, I’m so horrible. I need to change so people will like me.” It’s a humility that comes from a place of deep acceptance by God and recognizes that we all are continually in need of refinement.

Here is the other truth: sometimes people will judge you wrongly. They’ll make you feel like you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t. They’ll make you feel like you’re supposed to better in an area that isn’t important. For no reason other than their own failings and insecurities, they’ll doubt your intellect, question your motives, and attack your character. This type of judgment you must learn to let roll off you, like water off an oily duck butt.

How can I tell when I need to receive judgment in humility and when I need to blow it off? Here are some factors from my own experience to consider:

The source. Is it someone you love and trust? Does she make good decisions for her own life most of the time? Does she regularly offer you support and affirmation, in addition to the criticism or rebuke? If the answer is mostly yes, pay attention. If the answer is mostly no, disregard.

Your own feelings. Sometimes judgment stings the worst when we know it’s accurate. Listen to that part of you that is reacting with defensiveness and see if the reason for your defensiveness is because a chord has been struck. This requires humility and honesty with ourselves, which comes with practice. On the other hand, if you know someone’s criticism of you is based on wrong information, or it’s something about which your conscience is not stricken in the least, take a beat. Wait and see if other trusted people have the same critique.

Recurrence. My husband coined, or at least takes credit for, the following phrase: “If three or more people say it, you know it’s at least half true.” If you are hearing the same basic criticism from multiple trustworthy sources, it’s time to turn the lens on yourself and get to the bottom of things. If you do so and discover that no, you’re actually not doing anything wrong, move to a new city and find new friends. If those friends also have the same criticism of you once they get to know you, forget them and run for president, because apparently you are the only person who actually knows how to act right.

Grace and Truth

I tend to get a bit dramatic in conclusions. I write like everything is connected to everything and how lucky for you that you happened to read to the end of this random lady’s blog post so you could find the answer to life. I’ll try not to do that here, but I would like to say that Jesus is the answer to life. When I look to Him, I find complete acceptance for myself and a clearer understanding of other people. It is only with both of these components that I’m able to give and receive the loving kind of judgment, in grace and truth.