Jesus did not say, "Discern not."

I knew the fur would fly when I complained about the Catholic Lite interpretation of the weeds and the wheat.

People go straight to "thou shalt not judge", which has become the pet phrase of the so-called progressives. Yes, and I know there's a log in my eye.

However...

Jesus did not say, "Just go along and don't offend anyone and say "it's all good" and when I get there, I'll sort it out."

You'll notice that in the parable, the workers understood the difference between the weeds and the wheat. And Jesus did not say, "Just pretend it's all wheat until I get back."

I think one of the trickiest things Jesus did was to leaves us here in a world full of good and bad, and then tell us not to judge. But there is a difference between knowing good from bad and being the one to decide what will happen to the bad.

I was stewing about this one day when I was working on Dark Debts, which is, in large part, a book about the nature of Evil. I was thinking to myself, "Given the fact that there is genuine Evil in the world, and given the fact that I think God expects us to do something about that -- otherwise "justice" would not be an earthly concept -- what am I supposed to do with this "judge not" stuff? And (this used to happen a lot in those days) a loud voice in my head said, "Discernment is not a sin."

And that made sense.

I want to remember that there is a hell, not so I can declare that people less holy than I am will go there, but because I want to make sure I don't go there myself. And in order to do that, I have to know the difference between Godly and ungodly behavior. Jesus will be the one to sort it all out when he gets here, and frankly, I don't know if I'll be a sheep or a goat. But no matter what side of the divide I end up on, I want the righteous people to be rewarded for having been righteous and the evil people to be punished for being evil. As I've said before, the line "A God all merciful is a God unjust" really resonates for me.

Farther into the Gospel than we read today, Jesus says this:

(From Matthew 13)

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind.
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When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away.
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Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
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and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.

I don't know how he could have been any clearer than that. And I have to be able to recognize the "bad fish", so I won't go over to the "bad fish" side when the "bad fish" start telling me what a good idea it would be, or that they're no worse than I am, or that I should not judge.

Comments

And I see nothing in anything you've identified coming from that church as in disagreement with that.

[Venerable Aussie]

You've got to love the Universal Church!

Whether it's Los Angeles California or Melbourne Australia we all get the same spin on the wheat and the darnel: The only real sin is being intolerant and judgmental!

I loved your post. Discerment as you say is really the key. And we owe a duty of care to all our fellow Catholics: how will we fare on the last day if we led them astray in this life, or failed in our duty to lead them in the light of the Truth?

Two thoughts went through my mind as I listened yesterday to what passed as a sermon. I thanked God that St Paul did not have such a warped understanding of the Gospel teaching of his Lord and Master.

And I resolved to start nailing forever that "What would Jesus do?" red-herring.

The next time someone asks this, I'm gonna say that it's not so much what Jesus would do, it's what he DID. And what he did was to establish a Church. Now let's see what Jesus' Church says about how we discern and respond to good and evil. (flick, flick, flick, ah yes, the Catechism page...)

That would be a revolution!

[carey]

I love how God just consistently dares us to contradict our own nature, as you alluded to with the trickiness of being put on a terra firma full of wickedness and then not judging that.

I hope more folks pick up on the discernment thread you're putting out there. It's good stuff.

I've pushed God really hard the last few years. Just looking for him, getting close to his boundaries and who he is and why I should believe in him, beyond what I was taught in the legalistic protestant churches I grew up in. The one thing I've found to be true over and over again is that if you come to God honestly (and I mean honestly, not our usual modicum of truth we like to refer to as honesty), you can push him. He'll push back. Be prepared for it. But you can push him. And he will generally prove to be the most fascinating study in everything there is to know about one's self.

Discernment is something I've practically begged him for on so many occassions and, like it or not, he's often provided. The trick is keeping it almost diametrically oppossed to judgement. Judgement asks bias where discernment asks introspection. "There is evil," both say.

But then discernment will ask, "what can you do to alleviate that? And can it start with you?"

The real beauty of using these tools as opposing forces is that, when done so, you will often begin to know when to hand off one situation to the other.

Good stuff, K!

[Sr. Lorraine]

Jesus also said, "By their fruits you will know them." It seems to me he was advising us that while we can't judge anyone's standing in God's eyes, we can sure tell that some acts are good and some are evil.
Last week there was an obituary of a former Catholic priest who had left the church. The article quoted him as saying, "I didn't leave the church; the church left me." He went on to become a plaintiff for the ACLU in a lawsuit to block the display of a Christmas creche in a town outside Boston.
I don't know how he fared at his judgment, but I do know that his statement about the church sums up the kind of radical individualism that is at the root of dissent and all the chaos it's caused these last few decades. "By their fruits you will know them."

[mark]

I'm not a language expert, but with respect to the word "judge," I wonder what the word is in the original, and how it differs or how it may have been understood when spoken by Jesus. My take on the "do not judge" verses is that we should not think that we (being sinners ourselves) are any better than anyone else, not that we should ignore sinful conduct or not make conclusions as to whether such conduct is sinful.

To be sure, Jesus advocates on several occasions behavior that seems to involve "judging" others -- In Matthew alone, He says to guard against false prophets, not to pray and fast like the hypocrites, to shake the dust from your feet from the places that will not welcome you as a disciple of Christ, to avoid the pack of wolves who will persecute believers, to admonish the brother that sins against you, and to avoid blind guides and blind fools, not to mention all the people in the parables that we should not be like. He even recognizes that you will have enemies. He does not say "do not have enemies," He says only that we must love them. Clearly, then, "do not judge" does not mean that tolerance is the greatest virtue; it does not require us to accept anything and everything.

[just me]

I liked this post very much. It is intereting that so much can be 'tolerated' but not orthodoxy. I have been labeld rigid and all that and I was only speaking the Truths of the faith!

Ah, such times we live in.
Will the REAL Roman Catholic Church please stand up?

[Clayton]

A judgement is something required of intelligent beings all of the time. It's the process by which we make determinations of value.

The "judge not" sense has to do with judging persons, which we may never do. That task is reserved for Jesus at the Last Judgement. And personally, that's a job I'm more than willing to leave in his hands. Can you imagine the lawsuits they'll be flying at him?

[Maggie]

I agree Karen, discernment is the key. In the Lectionary reflection piece I wrote for our parish bulletin I asked people to think about the fact that evil is around them. They can either be non judgemental and ignore it, or expose it for what it is and speak the truth. The truth is the path to true freedom. Are we going to stand here being choked by the weeds or are we going to be strong in our faith in spite of them?