Overview:

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

“Jesus said to his disciples:
‘Stop judging, that you may not be judged.
For as you judge, so will you be judged,
and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.’” (Mt 7:1-2)

Find today’s readings here. 

Tacked to the wall of an English classroom at Red Cloud Indian School several years ago was a poster of Tupac Shakur, with the line, “Only God can judge me.”

As a baptized Christian for about 35 years, I had heard the call of Christ to “not judge” about a million times. And I got it, right? Don’t judge, lest ye be judged. Done. Even though I did and everyone does. Judge. All the time. 

But reading that poster whenever I would go in that classroom, it was as if it finally made sense to me: Oh, I get it, it’s God. God in the end. Ultimately, only the divine power of the universe can judge the scope of our lives. The pop culture mega star with the blue bandana who’s “had a past”, is declaring the truth of the Gospels. 

The phrase “Only God Can Judge Me” is not only one of Tupac’s most popular songs, off his 1996 double album “All Eyez On Me” and the title of a recent book published about Shakur; it is like a final word from the deceased rapper who stared out at us from the poster with a kind of mournful defiance: you don’t have the last word people, God does. A judge or jury or fan base or friends or enemies can render a verdict on our human conduct, but only God judges the conduct of our souls.

We can have opinions about people, we can “call people out” on their misdeeds, we can garner a sense of other people. But really, we just don’t know. We don’t ultimately know the secret wallpaper of a person’s heart, the torchlit passages of their past, the inner gears of their soul; what motivates them, what terrifies them, how complicit they are in their own actions, how compromised they might be by compulsion, addiction, trauma. 

In other words, we’re just not that proficient at judging other people, because ultimately we don’t have all the facts. And the giveback is simple: what I dish out, I’ll get in return. I throw sand in your face, you’re going to throw it back at me. 

The call of Christ is to stop doing the burdensome work of judging other people and to instead leave it to their Creator, who is far more equipped to do the job. 

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”