Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

What a treat that we’ve been working our way through the General Epistle of James this week!  One of the great (and exceptionally clear) things that James’ letter does is tease out a vision of the moral implications of following Jesus, of living into the life, death and resurrection of Our Lord, of what such a living-into ought to look like.  In our Office Reading today, the majority of the lection is taken up in a consideration of selfishness and envy: how true wisdom (which is to say, a pattern of living and thinking and acting and speaking that reveals a pattern of being in right relationship with God, others, creation, and ourselves) has nothing to do with selfishness and envy; how selfishness and envy are the root of wickedness and conflict; how selfishness and envy lead people away from prayer and humility toward empty striving, desire that can never be satisfied, and a confused sense of what is good and how to seek for it. 

Our reading then ends on an injunction not to judge others.  It’s on this injunction that I what to focus, Beloved, in part because it’s easily misunderstood…and requires a lot more of us than we might think.

Now...we might think that what James is advocating for here is a “live and let live” attitude toward others, or a “you stay in your lane and I’ll stay in mine” kind of mindset.  All of those ways of thinking and being, though, are quite foreign to James and to the Biblical moral witness generally!  We’ve just read about how selfishness and envy are spiritual poisons that don’t produce mercy or peace, and mercy and peace are not concepts or ideas that we keep to ourselves, nor are they practices we engage in on our own, but are things we cultivate in relationship and in community…so how can we imagine that James would counsel us, in the end, to stay in our lanes, or to imagine that we ought to have nothing significant to do with our neighbor, nothing to do with seeking or promoting their good, their thriving in virtue and in peace?

When James counsels us not to judge others, he’s inviting us to recognize a few realities.  First, judging another is a distraction from following the royal law of love: if we judge, we arrogate to ourselves a responsibility toward the law that is not ours to assume and we cease engaging in those responsibilities to which we have actually been called.  Second, if we’ve ceased being doers of the law of love, if we’ve thereby abrogated our relationship to the love on which all right judgement is based, whatever judgement we might render is laughably and inconsequentially absurd.  Third, if we’ve judged another, if we’ve written another off or condemned them, how are we to continue to meet our responsibilities to them if we no longer deem them worthy of our good attention?

When James counsels us not to judge others, he’s counselling us not to get in the way of doing the good that we owe to our neighbor, not to find excuses to ignore the good we owe to our fellow human beings simply by virtue of the fact that they are our fellow human beings and we’re in relationship with them.  And while the context of the judgement James is looking for us to avoid is one of “evil-speaking” which carries with it a sense of slander or biased critique or condemnation, James’ injunction against judgement works on every possible level.  Clearly it’s not our place to look at another human being and say, “Oh.  I don’t like them.  I have no responsibility to them.”  But nor is it our place to say, “Oh.  They’ve got it admirably together!  They don’t look like they need much, if anything.  I have no responsibilities to them.” It’s not our place to look at another and say, “Oh.  They look too rich or too poor or too sad or too happy or too straight or too gay or too female or too male or too non-binary or too familiar or too foreign or too cis or too trans or too old or too young or too healthy or too sick or too big or too small or too composed or too all-over-the-place…so I’ll look for someone more worthy of my attention.”  We don’t get to say that.  We don’t, in other words, get to judge.  Whatever human being we might encounter in the course of our life, we have a responsibility to promote, encourage, nurture and support their thriving in the good.  We have a responsibility to love them. 

Beloved, you and I both know: that’s not always easy or intuitive.  It requires courage, humility, an openness to the movement of the Spirit, and listening to what those with whom we’re in relationship are telling us (that’s part of what it means to be in relationship)!  It requires us to ask for help and to be humble enough to receive from others the good we ourselves need.  It doesn’t require that we know all the answers, but it does mean being willing to walk with others, being willing to be transformed in relationship with others. 

Live and let live may sound nice…but the lives and relationships to which James is calling us are so much better than nice: they’re truly good!

May we seek today, through prayer, the grace to live the pattern of right relationship, the pattern of wisdom, revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we may be both signs and agents of the goodness that God has always desired for the whole human family!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+