Right Judgment - Five
By Kristina Kaine
Created 06/22/2007 - 5:30pm
Taking the Middle Path
“If on the sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the sabbath I made a man's whole body well? Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” John 7:23-24
Rev Mario Schoenmaker spoke very powerfully in 1988 about Judgment when he said that the presence (parousia) of Christ will be accompanied by crisis:
“The word judgment in the Greek is krisis, it means that the parousia will produce a krisis. Read Matthew 11:22,24; 2 Thessalonians 1:5; Revelation 14:7. You can say, and truly so, that a crisis is a judgment.” 12.4.1988
We live now with the presence of Christ and this world is certainly in crisis. The crisis is the turning point, for better or worse. Right Judgment is the balancing that must occur if we are to become Christed – when the parousia comes to life in us. So shouldn’t we therefore embrace crisis? Or do we pray: Dear God, please keep crisis away from me, please give me a peaceful life?
Thessalonians is very descriptive:
This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering-- since indeed God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire,2Th:5-7 [0]The only way we can withstand the crisis and the affliction is to strengthen our connection with our I AM and to become conscious of the presence of Christ. These are prerequisites to remaining calm in crisis.
Rev Mario also said that we can say that Christ loves us, but he warned that sometimes it is a rejecting love. What do we do to earn Christ’s love? Not by saying simply saying that he loves us. We have to work at it, to continually strive to balance the scales. Through Right Judgment we can enter into Christ’s accepting love.
Our judging must always be tested to see if it is the Right Judgment. Remember how Christ kept asking Peter if he loved him in John 21? Peter got really annoyed, he didn’t see the clue. It wasn’t the ‘yes’ Jesus was after but the work of loving, the deed.
Right Judgment does contain an aspect of all the steps on the Eightfold Path. We shouldn’t speak or act or think without the Right Understanding or the Right Judgment.
At the time of Buddha the path to enlightenment was marked by the aesthetic life. You can’t get into much trouble gazing at your naval all day. Buddha could see that if we engaged with the world we would “set in motion the wheel of the law.” This means invoking karma and in so doing we meet the resistance required to propel us into the spiritual worlds. That was not the task for Buddha’s time, that is the task for now.
On the foundation of the Eightfold Path that lives within our being from past lives we can work with the wheel of the law consciously, through our own volition. We set the pendulum swinging and we allow the pendulum to swing widely enough so that we can visit the extremes; but through Right Judgment we take the middle path. For example, we experience the anger but we don’t express it. We feel pain but we don’t scream. We show our tears to God and our smile to the world as Buddha did.
So we really need to get our hands dirty in life, not shrink back and escape the opportunities presented to us. The days of cloisters or temples are gone; life is now the initiation temple. When we engage fully in the crises that life presents we strengthen our spiritual muscles. Then we are able to generate within ourselves the greatest of all expressions; love and forgiveness.
Right Judgment can also be called Right Intention. It requires our will. Right Understanding is about wisdom, cognition; Right Judgment is about our intention, and our commitment to higher values, to ethical and mental improvement.
Buddha distinguishes three types of right intention: 1. the intention of renunciation, which means resistance to the pull of desire, 2. the intention of good will, meaning resistance to feelings of anger and aversion, and 3. the intention of harmlessness, meaning not to think or act cruelly, violently, or aggressively, and to develop compassion.
Thoughtfulness is the hallmark of Right Judgment. In Right Judgment we stop and think; everything we do is intentional. We can enter a crisis and not lose ourselves in the swirling emotion, but calmly deal with the experience. Not withdrawing, nor forcing our way through, but exercising love and forgiveness; these are the gifts of The Christed One.