Letting Ourselves Be Surprised--February 28, 2025

Letting Ourselves Be Surprised--February 28, 2025

[Jesus said:] "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back." (Luke 6:37-38)

A wise woman I knew and loved many years ago used to say, "You never know what's going on underneath someone else's roof."  I have never forgotten her counsel.

She easily could have told herself she had earned the right to criticize or condemn other people. Once you reach a certain number of decades in your life, you have probably seen enough and survived enough that you can make pretty good assumptions about other people and their lives. You have seen enough deadbeats before to know when not to trust someone who gives off creepy vibes. You have heard your share of slimy sales-pitches from sleazeball schemers to know who is just selling snake oil. At some point in life, you have met enough people that it becomes hard not to typecast everybody and fit each person into some category or preconception.  Maybe all of those things are true, and yet this dear woman had decided the life lesson of her years was the opposite: don't assume you know who people are, what categories they do or don't fit into, or what else they have going on in their lives that you don't know about.

I think that's what I have held onto especially about her insight.  We may see some part of another person--the version they present in public, at work, on Sunday mornings, or on their social media.  But we simply don't know all the moving pieces in anybody's life, and we certainly don't have a complete enough picture to know everything going on under the surface.  The old observation is that people are a lot like icebergs--most of who we really are is hidden from view and below the water line.  And a more recent observation you may well have heard puts it this way: chances are that someone you cross paths with today is doing everything they can to just hold it together, and you would never know just to look at them.  Someone is trying to stay sober and exerting all their strength to keep from falling off the wagon. Someone is dealing with a crippling depression that comes out as bitterness or hostility toward other people, but is really about their own profound sadness and insecurity.  Someone's marriage is at the breaking point, and someone's kids just shouted, "I hate you!" in a fit of teenage angst for the first time.  All of this is to say that none of us have the whole story on anybody else, and we would be wise to remember that before we write someone off as brittle or flaky, as irresponsible or lazy, as unfriendly or rude.  Or as the voice in my memory used to say it, "You never know what's going on underneath someone else's roof."

I think it's in that same spirit that Jesus offers these words from the Sermon on the Plain, words that many of us heard back on Sunday as part of the Gospel reading.  I know that sometimes the sentiment, "Don't judge others, and you won't be judged" sounds too naive or unrealistic for modern cynics like us, but really, this is one of Jesus' most practical and grounded teachings if you think about it. Jesus is reminding us that we don't ever have all the pieces of the puzzle to someone else's life, and we would be both foolish and arrogant to pretend that we do.  He is saying, in so many words, "You never know what's going on underneath someone else's roof."  And honestly, keeping that truth in mind--as much as it forces us to use spiritual muscles that we have not exercised very much--makes a huge difference in our relationships.

This is especially true in a time like ours, when it is terribly easy to pigeonhole people into boxes or reduce them to shallow stereotypes rather than getting to know them.  We so quickly typecast people--by their political party, their tax bracket, their neighborhood, their skin color, their language, or the look of their family--that we often find it uncomfortable to do the hard work of seeing past stereotypes to get to know the real person beyond the prejudices we bring to them.  We decide in advance that we don't want to associate with "those people" (however we have defined that nebulous category), and then never get the chance to really know what "those people" are really like because we avoid them, so we are only left with our preconceptions and no new data to challenge or correct them.  Or we reduce people to a single character trait, a small slice of their story or circumstances, and never make the effort to get to know the richness of who they are beneath the one-dimensional oversimplifications we settled for.  Over against all the ways that our culture makes it easy to reduce others to cheap caricatures in our minds, Jesus brings us to a halt and says, "Wait. You don't have the whole picture.  What if you took the time to get to know the other person and to learn their story before deputizing yourself as their judge?" Especially in our time we need that voice.

Of course, some part of us resists taking Jesus' counsel here because we don't really want to be surprised.  Something inside of us doesn't want to be wrong or have our assumptions about others challenged or disproven, and so we look for reasons not to get to know people, to learn why they think or feel the way they do. We avoid finding out that the people we decided not to like can actually be deeply funny or compassionate.  We don't look for opportunities for the folks we know voted different from us to tell us why they think or see things differently--it's just easier to silently assume the worst, isn't it?  

The tragedy is that we are missing out on the beautiful richness of actually knowing other people in all their complexity.  Our lives are impoverished because we won't let ourselves really understand other as more than cardboard cutouts or shoddy assumptions, and Jesus offers an alternative.  When we stop ourselves from writing people off, we open up the possibility of getting to know their stories, learning from them, and letting ourselves be surprised.  What would happen if we heard Jesus' teaching not to judge others in that light--not as something we do only for their sake, but because we are missing out when we condemn people without getting to know and understand them?

Today, then, let's be wise enough to remember that we never really know what's going on underneath someone else's roof, and that it's worth getting to know the full picture before we write someone off, put them in a box, or label someone as "unworthy"? Like the old line goes, what if we were curious, rather than judgmental?  We might discover just how much we have been missing.  

Maybe we don't have to keep missing out anymore.

Lord Jesus, enable us to get to know other people in the fullness you know, so that we can love them as you do.