Who is my judge?

"To abandon myself is to abandon judging myself." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

I suppose it bears mentioning for the uninitiated that this abandonment is not a bad thing.  It refers to entrusting ourselves completely to God's love, and this quote represents the crux of the matter for me, and I imagine for many of us.  The reason we will not abandon ourselves to God is that we insist on sitting in judgment for ourselves.

For many, this is because we fear that God will judge us harshly.  We grew up with images of fire and brimstone, of hell and damnation, filling up our childish imaginations to make us do as we ought.  It may be that God was invoked mainly as a means of getting us to behave properly.  As adults, if some part of us might almost believe God is all powerful and all knowing, we don't believe God is all loving.  Or, if we do, we may believe his love is for others, while his judgment is for us.  We simply can't seem to trust at all that God is merciful and compassionate, that God's direction for our lives is intended for anything except to restrict our fun and keep us from doing what we want to do.  We prefer to judge ourselves and our actions as okay, or at least as not so bad as, you know, that other one, over there.

Others of us insist on judging ourselves harshly.  Maybe we've seen the hurt that we've caused others, those whom we love, and haven't learned to forgive ourselves at the same time we love them.  Sometimes that is compounded when, despite our best efforts to be gentle or cut ourselves some slack, we keep running into others' opinions, how they view those with whom we feel some similarity.  A divorced parent hears a Christian talking about how "God hates divorce," without the speaker or the hearer recognizing that God hates all our brokenness only out of an overwhelming love that wants to heal it all.  A recovered addict or abuser sees the ongoing hurt in which he knows he has participated, sees the fear and pain of those affected by this sin, and connects more with that harm than with his deliverance from it.

"To abandon myself is to abandon judging myself."  Christ, the derelict on the cross, has borne the penalty for my sin, so God is done condemning.  Only to the degree that I truly accept this can I stop trying to justify what defies justification, stop condemning those (myself) whose condemnation has already been paid.

I don't know how to stop hearing the cacophony of voices clamoring to crucify, but we must find a better answer than Pilate's.  We must stop giving the crowd more heed than the voice of the One who loves us, and has set us free from our guilt.