Judging or Being Judgmental? by the Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
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December 8, 2013, Second Sunday of Advent, Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12, Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
One of the persistent dilemmas facing all persons who acknowledge the awesome power of God in history is how to reconcile the theme of divine judgment with the human temptation toward self-righteousness in claiming for ourselves the right to impose on others that divine judgment ourselves.
This morning’s scripture lessons are full of references to judgment. In the reading from Isaiah the one who is coming will judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek. In the Psalm, the King’s son will rescue the poor and with judgment will crush the oppressor. And, in some of the strongest language in the New Testament, John the Baptist warns that the ax of judgment is ready to cut down the unfruitful trees and throw them into the unquenchable fire.
I suspect that there is some part of each of us ready to cheer on the righteousness of God as the evil doers are given their just desserts. There is something emotionally satisfying in seeing judgment meted out on those who have been doing evil. Extreme examples of such heightened emotions often occur when cries of “fry the S.O.B.” are frequently uttered by people waiting for the switch on the electric chair to be thrown or the fatal pill to be administered in this irrevocable and final act of human judgment.
But there is often a thin line between cheering on what we take to be God’s judgment and becoming the arbiters of that judgment ourselves, a thin line between judging and being judgmental. When human beings claim the mantle of divine authority in administering moral judgment on other people, they often meet an increasing resistance to the use of moral language at all when the subject involves complex social situations. Passing moral judgment on someone else has come to seem harsh, dogmatic, absolutist, and intolerant. There is a strong sentiment ‘out there’ that one’s moral judgment should be left out of social policy because it seems like a violation of each person’s inalienable right to hold whatever views one has without them being judged by others. And there is also a reluctance to judge social policy by moral criteria because it seems to intrude on the secular realm of politics. But politics, as we’ve said many times before, is the realm of people deliberating together to form a just and compassionate community. And if morals don’t have anything to do with the quality of our life together then morality may as well be declared dead. Unfortunately, we’ve seen many examples, especially when they promise political benefits, of people proclaiming that they have the only true morality and that God, at the final judgment, will send everyone else to hell.
The dilemma this poses for most of us is that we do believe that there are some basic moral values at the heart of God’s created order and purpose for history and that these values cannot be compromised. Yet at the same time we are also acutely aware of the danger of dogmatic denunciations of others who disagree with us especially in the area of social ethics. We sense the problem of coming off as judgmental, arrogant, or self-righteous. There is a fine line between knowing what righteousness is and engaging in a self-righteousness that regards the moral convictions of others as unworthy of respect.
There are a couple of points we need to remember as we confront this dilemma of holding tightly to basic moral values without falling into moral arrogance. One, we know that in the end it is not our finite judgments that matter, but God’s. We believe that the ultimate outcome of history is in God’s hands, not ours. We know the moral treasure God has given us but we have that treasure in earthen and therefore fragile and corruptible vessels.
Two, we also believe that we are called by God to contribute to the events that constitute the arc of history which, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, bends toward justice. We are not to be merely bystanders in the work of justice but to be deeply engaged in that work. We have no excuse to abstain from the work of justice because abstention is tantamount to indifference to the crying needs of others.
Three, we must acknowledge the limitations of the application of our moral vision to specific circumstances. We may glimpse with a high degree of certainty what the essential elements are in God’s moral vision for the world: we can all agree that these include love, compassion, mercy, peace, reconciliation, and justice. And we also know what is fundamentally incompatible with these values: abuse, indifference, oppression, and hatred. We know that love is more basic to doing God’s will than hate, compassion trumps mean-spiritedness, that justice is morally superior to oppression and discrimination, and so forth. These are core moral values that must never be compromised.
Four: we must also recognize that our moral judgments are not primarily against persons, but against principles and behavior. I do not have the right to judge the interior life of other persons. That is for God alone to do. But I do have a right, even an obligation, to judge their principles of behavior and the actions they perform in carrying them out. I know absolutely that racial, sexual and gender discrimination are wrong. I can’t make the same absolutist judgment about the state of the souls of those persons who engage in such discrimination.
This leads us to a fifth and final point. We have to acknowledge that the basic moral principles of our faith may lend themselves to a variety of different, but equally worthy, means of implementation. Our earthen vessels are many and are often different in shape and form. In acknowledging our own limitations, including our sinful tendency to identify our own self-interest with God’s purpose for us, we acknowledge that there may be real-world circumstantial factors that lead us constantly to adjust the means for carrying out God’s will as best we can discern it without morally condemning different means to the same end which other people have proposed. This pragmatic adjustment is not a sell-out or a fatal compromise in our basic moral values which remain the guiding star for our moral actions. But the pragmatic application of moral principles is a morality without self-righteousness, without the judgmental arrogance that assumes that if we know the basic moral principles then only our conception of how they can be carried out is truly right.
For example, one of the basic moral principles which has often been obscured behind the fractious discourse over the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), is our basic moral obligation to care for the health of those in need. No person in the Abrahamic traditions could ever conclude that we have no responsibility to provide the best possible health care to those who are in need of it, regardless of their medical condition or financial resources. This is a profoundly moral conviction, yet even some of supporters of the Health Care Act have shied away from embracing this moral conviction head on for fear of being seen as moralistic or judgmental on people who don’t share it. As New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse put it in an essay earlier this week, “One of the failures of the Affordable Care Act saga, it seems to me, has been the president’s unwillingness or inability to present universal health care as a moral issue, a moral right in a civilized society. Thus the administration meets the moral claims of its opponents in technocratic mode, one hand tied behind its back.”
The moral principle of affordable health care does stand in stark contrast with the moral claim that we are all on our own and owe nothing to the less fortunate among us and that contrast between these two moral claims must be pointed out unambiguously. But for those who agree on the moral principle that health care is a moral right to be met by our society as a whole, then there is an obligation to be open to different ways of achieving the same moral end. We can do this by discerning through reasoned argument what are the most effective means of providing health care to the suffering people in our society. We need to move beyond slogans, rhetoric, and ideology, whether on the left or the right. If we can agree on the basic moral principles at stake, then surely we have the basis for a discussion with people of good will as to what will be the most effective means of implementing those values. That discussion should be informed by the spirit of humility and openness, and an awareness that we are not God and do not exercise the divine right of final judgment upon the souls of those who disagree with us. We are instead merely God’s servants who humbly offer up our best insights for bending the arc of justice a little closer to the goal of history by standing firm on the core moral values of our religion without a descent into judgmentalism, arrogance, or self-righteousness.