A theme that has come up often in this series, most recently in Sunday’s post, is how there is no room in a genuine Christian life for judgmentalism. Again, this is very basic Christian teaching as it was one of the major themes of Jesus’ own teaching. We shouldn’t be surprised to see it come up so often here, and inasmuch as we’re committed to following Jesus, we would do well to apply it in our own lives as much as possible. Today I’d like to look at another saying on this theme, which I like because of its simplicity.
Whenever [Abba Agathon’s] thoughts urged him to pass judgement on something which he saw, he would say to himself, ‘Agathon, it is not your business to do that.’ Thus his spirit was always recollected. (Abba Agathon 18)
There’s a lot of wisdom for us in this short saying. First, it recognizes the inevitability of judgmental thoughts. As humans, our minds are designed to categorize quickly, to make snap judgments about what we encounter: safe vs. dangerous, friend vs. foe, normal vs. strange. And, as a survival strategy for creatures living in small groups of hunter-gatherers, this is probably very effective. So, to a large extent, judgmental thoughts are hard-wired into being human. But, they are also strongly influenced by our own experiences, so that new things are often immediately categorized as ‘bad’. They are also influenced by our communities’ values and beliefs, so that ‘different’ things are judged to be ‘wrong’. This makes such snap judgments less helpful in larger communities, such as those that were emerging during the time of the Old Testament, or the cosmopolitan Roman Empire of Jesus’ day — to say nothing of our own global, interconnected world. In environments like this, our natural instinct to snap judgments often leads us astray. In this way, it’s no different than our many other good and God-given instincts, like for food, sex, safety, and so on. In a world where sin exists, where we are influenced by cultural factors and the whims of social contagion, our judgments are more likely to cause us to break faith with others, that is, to sin ourselves, than they are to keep us safe, in body, mind, or soul.
The question, as this Saying rightly points out, isn’t whether we will have judgmental thoughts — because we will — but what we are to do with them. Abba Agathon’s example is a helpful place to start. Whenever judgmental thoughts entered his mind, he would stop and remind himself that judging others is not his job.
This is, I think, the difference between judgment as a virtue and judgmentalism as a sin: Judgment is about discerning how I should live; judgmentalism is when I turn that lens, which is supposed to be aimed inwardly, outwardly at others. And that is simply not my job. It is my job to keep my eyes on my own plate, or to use another analogy, to keep my side of the street clean.
Judging others is not our job first of all because we have a hard enough time getting our own lives in order, without wasting time and energy on what others are doing. Secondly, it’s not our job because we don’t have all the information. We see an action, but not the motivation behind it. Third, it’s not our job because in a fallen world our rash judgments are as likely to be wrong as any action we’re prone to judging. And all this is why, fourthly, it’s not our job because God alone is the judge. God is the one who has the judgment, perspective, and information to judge fairly. (And remember: God’s Law is love and mercy).
So, whenever judgmental thoughts cross our mind, we’d do very well to take Abba Agathon’s example as our own and say, “Self, it is not your business to do that.”
Matthew Root 