Overview:

Friday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

“The one who judges me is the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 4:4)

Find today’s readings here.

I met Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe once when I was in college. I was at All Saints Catholic Newman Center in Tempe, Ariz., which was run by Dominicans at the time. Father Radcliffe was, if memory serves, just visiting as Master of the Order, a role that took him to churches and missions run by Dominicans. 

He was kind, gentle and amazing, even though I don’t remember anything he said. Funny, charming, approachable. It just seemed like everyone in the gathering was perfectly comfortable in Father Radcliffe’s presence. He didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He was just himself. And I distinctly remember how he wore his hair. I’m quite sure he didn’t comb it. 

Years later, I think it was in a Thomas Merton book, I read something about saints not being self-conscious. And I immediately thought of Father Radcliffe. To this day, I wish I was more like him. 

“I do not even pass judgement on myself,” St. Paul writes in today’s reading from 1 Corinthians. The line arrests me. Because I most certainly judge myself. 

And others! Oh yes, I certainly do that too, even though I know I’m not supposed to. 

“Stop judging, that you may not be judged,” the Lord says (Mt 7:1-2). “For as you judge, so you will be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” It echoes the Lord’s Prayer, which conditions our forgiveness on us forgiving others. 

In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes: “It does not concern me in the least that I be judged by you or any human tribunal.” It’s not about what others think of him, or even what he thinks of himself. He only cares about what God thinks, for it is God who judges him. It is for God to judge all of us, so we need not bother judging ourselves or others. 

What would it be like if I didn’t judge myself? I imagine I would stop judging others as well, that I’d be kinder and gentler, that everyone would be comfortable around me. I’d probably stop being so self-conscious, and maybe I’d even stop combing my hair. What freedom there must be in that.

J.D. Long García is a senior editor at America and co-author of Clericalism: The Institutional Dimension of the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis.