This morning’s Gospel reading is a tough one.
“Stop judging and you will not be judged.”
Ouch.
But it gets worse.
“For as you judge, so will you be judged…”
Double ouch.
The Gospel writer goes on to quote Jesus about boards and splinters and eyes and beams. We’ve heard it before.
These days it is hard to not to judge. The media seems to encourage it. Politicians welcome it. Families suffer from it. Relationship are destroyed by it.
Judge not… what a concept.
It is appropriate, then, that today we also celebrate two great saints: St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More.
John Fisher was a bishop who refused to recognize the king of England, Henry VIII, as the supreme head of the church in England. He was executed on orders of the king, who could not stand being embarrassed by those whose reputations as a theologian and scholar were greater than his own reputation as ruler.
The other guy we commemorate is my favorite (beside Patrick, of course). Thomas More was also executed for his refusal to recognize the king over the pope as head of the church, More was the Lord Chancellor of England, whose final days are recounted in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man For All Seasons. I read that play every summer and taught it when I was a junior high teacher and, again, more recently, in a class I taught at a local university. At the end of the play, More stands on the dais, about to lose his head for following his conscience and says, (at least in the play), “I have been commanded by the king to be brief, so brief I will be. I die here the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
More and Fisher served the king well. When the king didn’t get what he wanted, he simply made himself the head of the church, granted himself the divorce, and thus was free to marry the woman who would become one of many in a succession of wives. It was a declaration (think: executive order) that he wrote with his advisors that made him able to do these things and it turns out it was a declaration that went against his own coronation oath.
When I was teaching junior high, I gave a review that was more than thirty pages long. Students could use books, parents, other teachers, even each other to find the correct answers. After all, it was only a review, not the final exam.
The final exam, it turns out, was only one question. After all their study of the “facts of the faith,” their final to get out of middle school religion was simple:
“How are you God’s first?”
Perhaps if all of us – including me – asked that question more often, there would be a lot less judging going on.