Whatever Your Personality, Don't Judge (30.C)

 

The New York Times has a feature called “Overlooked,” a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths they failed to report over the years. Recently they told the story of Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers.

Theirs is one of the most interesting stories of modern psychology. Together they created one of the most widely used personality assessment tools in the world, now “standard at hundreds of companies and universities and in government. More than two million people take the Myers-Briggs personality test each year.” 

Before the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator came along, most psychological tests “concluded that each personality category has a positive and a negative: An extrovert is good, an introvert was bad, for instance.”

Rather than build a test that favoured one type of personality over another, Myers and Briggs had the idea to create one that was judgement-free, emphasizing what was right with a person, not what was wrong.

The results of the test are sixteen possible personality types, based on four dimensions of personality. I’ve already mentioned the first dimension: introvert or extrovert. But it’s the fourth that really interests me: how a person deals with the outside world, either as a judge or a perceiver.

It really shouldn’t surprise anyone that my Myers-Briggs profile shows me to be an E: an extrovert. But it might make you nervous coming to me for confession when I tell you I am a J: someone who judges.

If we know the positive nature of the test we won’t “confuse Judging with judgmental, in its negative sense about people and events. They are not related.” In fact, those are the words of  Mrs. Myers, who was a J herself.

These observations help us to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “Judge not lest ye be judged” (Mt. 7:1). Christians have struggled with that since the earliest times. Eventually the theologian Tertullian concluded in the second century that the command to “judge not” is a reminder to us that judgement and punishment belong to God, not to us.

Yet even if judgement ultimately resides with God,  Christians still struggle with putting these words into practice, given how naturally judgement comes to us.

Jesus and the Evangelists who recorded his teachings would have known of this problem—which may well explain why we just heard a parable that presents the wrong kind of judgement in such a truly awful light.

“Judge not lest ye be judged” might not be enough to derail our natural tendency to be judgemental, especially if we are Js on the Myers-Briggs scale. However, Jesus gives us, in just a few words, a portrait of the Pharisee that is a wonderful antidote to the poison of judgementalism.

In the first place, we naturally recoil at the self-satisfied words of the Pharisee. Even when we admire someone it’s most uncomfortable to hear them blowing their own horn.

There’s a wonderful story about a businessman known for his ruthlessness telling the American humorist Mark Twain “Before I die, I plan to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments out loud at the top.”

 “I have a better idea,” said Twain, “you could stay home and keep them.”

And in the second place, our Gospel today offers clear judgements on the proud Pharisee. St. Luke tips us off at the very beginning of the story, telling us that the parable is about those who think they are righteous but regard others with contempt. Then Jesus himself tells us that it was the tax collector, not the Pharisee, who went home justified.

I owe a lot to the television series called “The Chosen,” even if it is a dramatization not to be confused with the Scripture texts themselves—something like the Netflix show “The Crown.”

High on the list is the figure of Matthew the tax collector. We’ve heard many times about the reputation of tax collectors at the time of Jesus, but it really took the oily and slimy Matthew in “The Chosen” to give me a vivid picture. (Thank Heaven for his conversion!)

Jesus could not have picked a better contrast to make the point of this parable. Despite their bad reputation today, Pharisees were religious men and some of them were very serious about their faith. The Pharisee Nicodemus comes off very well in “The Chosen,” and despite Matthew’s conversion, tax collectors were the bottom of the pile. Even today, my seminary classmate who had worked for the British equivalent of Revenue Canada took a lot of ribbing about his past employment.

When Jesus tells us that the tax collector’s act of contrition brought him into God’s favour—indeed that he was exalted in God’s sight—he tells us almost all we need to know about humility.

And when he tells us that God did not consider the generous Pharisee to be righteous, Jesus lets us see how God judges.

Clearly these are not side issues in Christ’s teaching. In the next chapter, St. Luke tells the story of a real tax collector, Zacchaeus, who receives the same divine judgement as the fictional one in the parable. To him Jesus speaks directly: “Today salvation has come to this house.”

To make progress the world needs every kind of personality, introverts and extroverts and the judges and perceivers. But the Kingdom of God welcomes only the penitent and the humble, because they are those whom Jesus came to save.

If we make no other prayer at Mass today, let it be “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”