Dave Brisbin 5.24.26
When Jesus says, do not judge, for in the way that you judge, you will be judged, and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you, he is saying something immense.
But we don’t get it.
Squeezed through our default perspective, which is always legal, we see life through a performance-based, reward and punishment paradigm that peels off just one of the possible meanings of Jesus’ saying: that if we consciously judge/condemn others, we will be judged back. And through our legal lens, God is the one doing the retaliatory judging in some karma-like way. But the Aramaic language itself and Jesus as a Jewish mystic point to much more.
Our minds are judging machines. That’s all they do. Compare, contrast, calculate odds for advantage and survival, dualistically judging each moment and everything in it as good or bad for our needs and agenda. Good and evil appear mutually exclusive and morally opposed against the standards we have absorbed since childhood. And those standards objectify all of life around us, create heroes and villains, preferences and aversions, and a sense of separation from everything we encounter. Like an exhausting game of chess, every move we make is calculated toward a never-ending series of outcomes always present in our minds but never the moment.
In Aramaic, taba and bisha, good and evil, are not legal terms, they are relational. Literally meaning ripe and unripe, the highest good and evil for an ancient, agrarian society, they form a continuum from immaturity to maturity—the ability to nourish, preserve life and relationship. To begin to see good and evil as a continuum of functionality is a first step into the flow of life and away from constant judging, objectifying, separating.
The full reach of Jesus’ statement is to master the automatic, unconscious working of our minds that takes us out of the flow of every moment, out of connection with everything we encounter. Until we can use our minds as the tools they are, tempered with the ability to stop judging, seeing life as pairs of opposites, we remain stalled along our Way from bisha to taba…and our own sweet ripeness.
