A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-Second Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“Therefore, do not make any judgment before the appointed time, until the Lord comes, for he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts, and then everyone will receive praise from God.”
Growing up in a family that included mental health professionals, I learned the following aphorism at an early age: “Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.” Many of us know ourselves well—or, at least, we think we do—and are familiar with our own ways of responding to and reconciling ourselves with the challenges and joys of the world. Yet out of this salutary self-knowledge often springs a perilous habit: Knowing our own psyches and souls, we assume that everybody else expresses themselves in the same ways. From this faulty assumption, we draw flawed conclusions about others’ thoughts, feelings and dispositions based on how we interpret their external presentation.
In today’s passage from his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul explains to Christians how they should carry themselves in the world. (No big deal, right?) In the process, he alerts his audience to a trap into which people of faith often fall: the temptation to be judgmental. Even though we cannot look into others’ hearts, we believe that we know how “normal” people (which too often means “most like me”) think, behave and act. As a result, we sometimes imagine that our own habits and preferences reflect God’s, and proceed to condemn others for their puzzling failure to be like us. Perhaps we are very vocal and enthusiastic when we go to church and, seeing a more reserved parishioner, assume that the person in question doesn’t really care about his or her faith. Or, on the flip side, we prefer quiet, demure devotion and view those who pray or sing too loudly as brash and irreverent. Yet even before Paul’s time, God already warned us against this tendency in 1 Samuel 6:7: “God does not see as a mortal, who sees the appearance. The Lord looks into the heart.”
If we are not called to be judges, what is our purpose? As Paul writes, we are “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” These mysteries transcend our prejudices and preconceived categories. The Christian faith life is a thing of awe and wonder, not of formulas; although there are surely doctrines in which we must believe—for instance, I’ll certainly raise my eyebrow if a person who claims to be Christian denies Jesus’ divinity or his Resurrection!—there is no single, divinely ordained way in which to manifest or express our faith in daily life. (Put differently: there are indeed wrongways to be Christian, but there is more than one right way.) Some Catholics find that they grow in holiness through personal pious practices such as abstaining from meat on Fridays outside of Lent, praying the rosary daily, or wearing a scapular, while these same disciplines leave others cold. Some Catholics find the beauty of holiness in Palestrina’s polyphonic motets; others locate it in the songs of the St. Louis Jesuits. (Others still, myself included, find God in both.) What unites all of these people is the love of Jesus that dwells in their hearts; to call that love into question based on externals would be a grave injustice.
Paul reminds us that it is our devotion to Jesus that truly matters, beyond our subjective interpretations of others’ practices or appearances. We cannot compare our insides to anybody else’s outsides; only God, who knows every human being’s insides better than they do themselves, can pass such judgments. Our job is instead to bear witness to Jesus in the manner that God, through our prayer and discernment, calls us to do.
