Judgment is our illness

Wisdom 11:22-12:2

This was the 1st reading from one of our Sunday liturgies, and it really caught my intention.  There's something about the Book of Wisdom that is, well, wise.  I'm not sure how to better express the absolute love that comes from the words we just heard.

In this particular collection of verses, we hear about God's vast knowledge.  The entire universe is compared to a single grain or a drop of dew.  To God, it is nothing and yet everything.  One of the lines that really caught my attention, "But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook people's sins that they may repent."  If our God didn't have mercy on us, how could we ever survive?  We can never be perfect, but we have been cleansed perfectly in the Blood of the Lamb.  I often ponder how different God is from us, yet we persist in giving God human tendencies and idiosyncrasies.  I might struggle with showing kindness to someone who has hurt me, or hurting someone else because I have been hurt.  It could follow that I assign God a similar disposition of 'punishing me' or letting me down, because my human experience expects that behavior on a human level.  But God is divine, all-knowing, and all-good.  God does not desire separation from us.  Rather, we, as humans, have taken it upon ourselves to move away from God for one reason or another.  Maybe we were hurt, so we want to 'hurt' God.  Or we did something that another person couldn't forgive, so we assume that God wouldn't forgive us either.

We have a major illness:  Judgment.

We judge our thoughts and actions.  We judge God's message of salvation.  We judge others.  The list could go on and on.  In Wisdom, God is called, 'lover of souls,' and we struggle to believe it.  We are called to release our narrow view of the world.  Only God can cure us of our judgment illness.  We must turn over our lives to God, keeping one thing in mind - God prefers reconciliation to condemnation (Living Liturgy, 2013).

Prayer - God, lover of my soul, help me to release my judgments.  Only You are able to judge justly.  Help me to show compassion to others.