Monday, March 21, 2011

Measure for Measure

I noticed something about today's Gospel, Jesus' teaching, "Do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned....give and it shall be given to you, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over..."
Even though it seems common currency to think of God in terms of judgment and condemnation (or, as one snarky blogger put it, as the cosmic "sheriff"), Jesus' words indicate that those are human actions that recoil on the self-appointed judge measure for measure. Those "shalt nots" do not correspond to divine qualities (Jesus himself said, "The Father judges no one" and "I will not be the one to condemn you"), but the positive injunctions do: God pardons, God forgives--and God does that according to God's own measure, which is to say, in unmeasured abundance.

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