GOOD FRIDAY 25th March 2106
SECOND ADDRESS : Pass no judgement 12.15
The One who hangs upon the Cross speaks to us today:
“ Judge not that ye be not judged.” Come follow me, be not one of those who passes judgement, be one of those who sets others free.
“ Judge not….” yet how easily thoughts of judgement slip into the mind like a snake, slip into the heart and fester, slip off the tongue like a razor, slip into the eyes like a ray of darkness, slip into the angry response, slip into war. How quick we are to judge when our opinions and convictions, and who we think we are, feel threatened.
How easily we desert the invitation from the Cross and become one of the judgers. We feel ourselves able to act like gods, sitting on thrones and passing acts of judgement, even on people about whom we know virtually nothing.
One of my favourite stories from the Desert Fathers concerns Abba Moses. It goes like this:
“ Once a brother committed a sin in Scetis, and the elders assembled and sent for Abba Moses. He, however, did not want to go. Then the priest sent a message to him, saying: Come everybody is waiting for you. So finally he got up to go. And he took a worn-out basket with holes, filled it with sand and carried it along. The people who came to meet him said: What is this, Father ? Then the old man said: My sins are running out behind me, yet I do not see them. And today I have come to judge the sins of someone else. When they heard this, they said nothing to the brother and pardoned him.”
It is not just the inner life of those whom we so easily judge that we cannot truly see but we cannot truly see our own inner life either – the motivations, pressures, formations, fears and sins that make us think and act as we do. And in our post-Freudian , post-Jungian world we know that it is often our own inner shadow, our own inner darkness that we cannot face that we project on to others. T. S. Eliot again put it like this :
“ And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.” Little Gidding
To go into the desert is to be willing to offer yourself to an experience of stripping which at times may seem terrible and more than you can bear, but the pain of the stripping brings you to a point of knowing that the new life which is to flow cannot come from your own efforts and so at last you become open to the stream of life that flows from the Cross.
In the desert you can become confronted with the impossibility of your own self-salvation upon which you had relied for so long, maybe for a lifetime.
Henri Nouwen in his beautiful book on Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son writes this as he reflects on the elder son in the story:
‘ Can the elder son in me come home ? Can I be found as the younger son was found ? …Confronted with the impossibility of self-redemption I now understand Jesus’ words to Nicodemus: “ Do not be surprised when I say: ‘You must be born from above.” Indeed something has to happen that I myself cannot cause to happen.” That is the moment when we are re-born in Christ, that is the moment of the new creation.
To learn the way of non-judgement does not come easily to most of us.
There are many accounts of the struggle of the desert monks with their passions, with the demons, in the silence of the desert , they had to be willing to take on this combat but they did not do so in the spirit of ego filled self-mastery, although that temptation would have been there too. They sought to do did it trusting to the Cross and trusting to their fellow monks in the desert. That is why the monks and sisters were encouraged to take part in what was called the ‘manifestation of thoughts’ to a senior brother or sister, because we are all drawn irresistibly back to manage on our own, in our own strength.
The monk said Abba Moses “ must die to his neighbour and never judge him at all in any way whatever” for he said “ if you are occupied with your own faults, you have no time to see those of your neighbour.”
So as we come before the Crucified One today maybe we can hear him speaking anew: ‘Judge not that ye be not judge’ and maybe we can remember Abba Moses and his basket of sand.
Hymn: O happy band of pilgrims ( EH 418)