Matthew 7:1 tells us “Judge not lest ye be judged” which is good advice, but I’ve always thought they just could have stopped with judge not.
We shouldn’t refrain from judging other people because they might judge us in return, we should just refrain from making judgments about the behavior and life choices of other people. It’s tough to do, since everything around us seems to be about judgment some days, but really, we can’t make judgments if we don’t have all the evidence and, generally, we don’t.
Judgments are easy to make because they’re generally pretty quick. We use the phrase “snap judgments” for a reason. We get a small glimpse of the circumstances of another person’s life, and we decide whether that glimpse meets with our approval. In an instant, a person could be condemned or assumed to be something they’re not based on a small glimpse of one moment in the flow of a life. It’s a pretty crazy system.
The thing about making judgments is that it puts the person making the judgment in a position of superiority. When we judge someone, what we’re saying is that we know how they should be conducting their life better than they do. Based on no other knowledge than the little snapshot of their life we see when we make our judgment, we decide whether we think what someone is doing is good or bad, right or wrong. When you think about it, how would you feel if someone made a judgement about your life based on the small bit of it they’ve seen?
With the advent of the virus, there have been a lot of judgments made. People have opinions about those who have elected to file for unemployment without known any of the circumstances behind why those people who filed made the decisions they made. Others are concerned with shelter in place orders and the infringement of rights, or they have thoughts about how others are following the orders. People are even making judgments about whether or not the crisis is as severe as we’ve been told that it is. It seems almost everyone has an opinion about how other people should live their lives, often while ignoring the issues in their own backyard.
In the end, the only one who you are qualified to judge is yourself, because that’s the only story that you know in full. It’s easy to decide that other people are doing something wrong based on what you can see or what little you know, but you always have to remember that there’s more to the story than what meets the eye. Everyone is just trying to navigate the world as best they can and the majority of people are trying to make decisions that bring the most good into the world, or at least I’d like to believe that’s so. Given that, the next time you make a judgment about what someone else is doing, give that person the benefit of the doubt. Or, better yet, simply elect not to make a judgment at all.
