Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 2:13

One of the issues of our day is Fake News. Now, there’s nothing new about fake news. It’s just exposed in our day that your fake news is interfering with my fake news. So the realization that there’s fake news out there becomes unavoidable.

Fake news annoys people because we want to believe that our positions and decisions are based on facts rather than hype and spin. When we’re forced to admit that any news we hear or see is possibly, even likely, to be fake at some level, it makes us uncomfortable. And that’s exactly why our judgments of each other are so dangerous.

Our judgments of others is based on fake news; incomplete information; spin and assumption based on biases that fit in with our preconceptions. We don’t know all the facts; we make assumptions about why people are behaving the way they are with unreliable and sketchy data. Therefore the one we judge can’t even get a fair trial in our minds or hearts/attitudes.

So it’s no wonder Jesus drew His followers’ attention away from judgment and toward love. You might think Love and Judgment don’t have much to do with each other, but they are close opposites, so they have more to do with each other than we might think.

In its purest form, love is the most powerful emotion that exists. Forget ‘love is a decision’. That’s just a weak attempt to get away saying we love when we don’t. Love isn’t based on facts and figures. Judgment, on of the other hand, attempts to build a case (usually against someone) using data. That data may be true, but it may be fake news…or a combination of truth and false facts and figures.

Regardless of the emotions that we may feel that makes it easy for us to judge others (“non-Love” or “Hate”), judgment is a like a legal trial, trying to build a case from the information we have or can manufacture, and ignore information we don’t have (or perhaps we do have it, but ignore, because it doesn’t support our desired conclusion).

Love, on the one hand, draws together. The power of love is to overcome barriers (based on things like different theologies, lifestyles, race, religion, age, gender, income, political affiliation, etc.). Given time, there is nothing that love in its purest form cannot draw together. We can see the power of love in the most unlikely relationships.

Judgment, on the other hand, almost always separates and categorizes. The only thing judgment draws together is people who share the same fears. Judgment naturally creates hierarchies and pecking orders within groups like churches, work groups and families. We see this in our neighborhoods, our politics, and international relations. Judgment in nearly always behind genocide, war and cold-war-like attitudes.

Love, in its truest form, is unconditional. It faces even its object’s flaws with mercy; it tries to help them be the best they can be. The very nature of judgment is conditional. It requires questions and answers, and while we like to think our judgment of others is based on objective truth, it rarely can be—because we don’t know enough. All we have is snippets of truth strung together by opinion, conjecture, rationalization and justification.

Love rarely sneaks up on us. We know who we love. But judgment is much subtler, and often we don’t realize when we have formed judgments. The subtleness of these influences on our judgments often lead to arrogance and once that happens, even the most thinly veiled fake news that supports our pride sounds like truth to us.
Allow love and mercy triumph over judgment today!