Pastor Ash Dotson
Pastor Ash Dotson
Hey folks, Ash Dotson here with a thought and an invitation to join us at Oasis UMC in the Laredo Room, Sundays at 9:30 a.m. Jesus tells us in John 7:24: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgement.”
This is a tough one, folks. Motivation, motivation, motivation … what motivates us to do this or that, to think this way or that way, to feel one thing or another? What motivates us to judge people in a positive or negative light? Some say the Bible tells us not to judge at all, but here Jesus is telling us to judge with “right judgement,” and according to the statement above, “right judgement” doesn’t take appearances into account. How do we judge rightly? We can only judge rightly if we are judging with the right motivation.
When it comes down to it, there are two different types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is pretty much as it sounds–desire for our betterment. Intrinsic motivation comes from the desire for discovery, the desire to gain knowledge, or the desire to better oneself without an external reward being attached.
On the other hand, extrinsic motivation is driven by things external. It is driven by rewards such as money, one’s standing in the community, or power. We have been raised and are taught by society to be extrinsically motivated. We are expected to be motivated by what we are going to get out of believing one way or another or acting one way or another. We tend to judge in the same way. We are motivated to judge someone or something based on how our judgement will affect us personally (wealth, power, standing, etc). We also judge based on soothing our fears.
If our motivation to judge is extrinsic, that means it is ego driven and fear based; therefore, it cannot be the “right judgement” that Jesus is speaking of here. It’s easy to tell if our judgement is extrinsically motivated: does our judgement benefit us personally in any way and harm someone else? If so, you are not judging rightly. “Right judgement’ is intrinsically motivated. With right judgement, our desire is to learn about the person, to learn what makes them believe, act, and think differently than we do. The benefit to judging rightly is that we learn to love that person as God loves that person because all of our extrinsic motivations are taken out of the picture. Judging rightly turns our eyes from what we perceive in another as failure or even a cause for revulsion to their beauty and inherent esteem as a child of God.
How are you at judging rightly? Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) a Catholic priest, theologian, and mystic stated, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” So the idea expressed here is that right seeing (or judging) only happens when we are united with the divine gaze, a gaze of love, not ego or fear.