People seldom judge you for your real faults. Instead, they judge you for their own faults which they apply to their image of you, or they judge you for not living up to their expectations, or because they think you are not following the rules—not their rules, of course, but the Rules.Your real faults—and here you may or may not know them—usually go unnoticed, uncriticised. It takes too much time and trouble to look at people as they really are. It’s easier to imagine them. It’s easier to worship—or to demonise—them, but to take them ‘as is’, we haven’t time.
Ever afraid to come home? If the answer is ‘yes’ then it is a question of having a home at all, because home is all about welcome, acceptance, affirmation, interest in one another, love. ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere…’
He wasn’t talking only about a comfortable spot to rest. In all the world, no such place was found for Him, or offered, until a rich man offered His newly excavated tomb, and there, He was finally able ‘to lay His head’. Is this the only home we have to offer those we say we love?
Brethren, let us love one another, as the holy apostle says, quoting His Divine Master who also says it to us. He never said, ‘Judge one another as I have judged you,’ but rather, ‘Love one another as I have loved you. Then you will be My disciples. Greater love has no man than this…’
Judgment is the law of this present age.
Mercy is the law of the age to come.
‘How blessed are the merciful,
for they shall have mercy shown them.’
* Κρισις και ελεος, krísis ke éleos, ‘judgment and mercy’
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