Jesus said to his disciples:
“Stop judging, that you may not be judged.
For as you judge, so will you be judged,
and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother,
‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’
while the wooden beam is in your eye?
You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first;
then you will see clearly
to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” (Mt 7:1-5)
We do this so much in our lives that we do not even pay attention to it anymore. That would be: judging.
When someone walks into a room, we size that person up immediately. Without any knowledge of that person we begin to infer all sorts of things. We think them to be weak or strong, conservative or liberal, a follower or a leader, and on and on.
When we get to know more about that person, we often find that our first assumptions were totally wrong. But the damage may already have been done. Because when we judged, we also told others about what we thought. We may have colored other people’s judgments about the person who was totally opposite from our perceptions.
What goes around comes around.
Many people do the same thing to us. We reap what we sow.
Jesus wants us to cut the foolishness. He wants us to give other people a chance. He wants us to look clearly at a person and that means removing all of our assumptions, our prejudices, our mistaken thoughts.
We need to work on ourselves first or else we will never see other people in the correct light.
FAITH ACTION: Have we judged someone harshly? It might behoove us to give that person a second chance today. The problem, after all, may not be the other person. It might be us!