The Joy of Judging Others
An awkward Sunday of time travel spent considering the prodigal son.
“For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 2
I’m not especially proud of how judgmental I am, though I do come by it honestly. Mine are a people who, for generations, have sat around wooden tables drinking beverages while conversing about the latest family drama or defects observed in our neighbors and friends. “Did you see?” “Did you know?” and “Have you heard?” were three questions that, like flint, could in seconds fire up a conversation that would entertain us for hours.
I didn’t care much for the gossip. I was in it for the finger-pointing. By my 8th-grade year at P.S. #14, I was nearing black-belt status when Alexa Braden and Lauren Kapsalakis showed up to school wearing Guinea tees with thick black eyeliner and loose men’s ties around their necks. It was 2002, the year that Avril Lavigne dominated the charts, and mainstream punk acts like Good Charlotte and Sum 41 had even the preppy boys trading in their Aeropostale for Vans shirts and spiking their hair. I was a metalhead then, and the word “poser” slid off my tongue so naturally that it was as if God or the devil had placed it there without my knowing it.
The dopamine released from judging mainstream music consumers for their inferior taste made me feel so good that I cast my net even wider by high school. Second- and third-generation Puerto Rican and Italian kids who claimed immigrant identities but couldn’t speak their mother tongues were a different sort of poser than Braden or Kapsalakis (who, per LinkedIn, has a PhD in history from MIT, though that’s neither here nor there). And classmates who studied or took SAT Prep courses instead of winging it on the day of the test were “not really smart, just good at memorization.” Only Jeremy, whose superlative intellect was as much the result of his parents not letting him drink soda or watch television as the enormous Medusa-like orb that engulfed three-quarters of his head, was safe from my poison darts.
When I became a Christian at 17, I learned an entirely new and awesome system of justice. With God by my side, my judgment was no longer inconsequential. Now, I could tell people that they were going to hell if they didn’t live as I, the arbiter of His justice, wished them to.
That is one of the things I really love about church. There is just so much condemnation to go around in a congregation of people claiming to live by the Holy Book. Pull up in a Mercedes? Good luck passing through the eye of a needle, friend! Tattoo sleeves (“You’re the temple of the Holy Spirit, brother!”) or patriotism (“God over country!”) or reading the wrong translation of the Scriptures (“Jesus only taught the ESV, according to John Calvin”)—don’t even get me started on dudes with long hair, just pull up 1 Corinthians 11:14 real quick then come talk to me.
Which brings me to the stimulus for today’s ramble: last Sunday.
With Redeemer, the church I’m a member of, under construction for much of this past year, parking has been more limited than usual. The best spots, about 30 of them, are in a gravel lot beside the building, which is located in the densely populated Fort Sanders neighborhood of the city, a few blocks up from UT’s campus. As there are more than 400 people who frequent our church across two services each Sunday, these spots are intended for those who can’t easily maneuver the steep hills of the Fort or who don’t wish to park amidst the splayed-out bodies of still-inebriated college students. Since the musicians arrive early, when the lot is still empty, the band leader, Ben, texted us, asking kindly that we find parking elsewhere in Babylon that morning. And as we are mostly young and able-bodied, this should not have been an issue.
But I’ve seen enough of the South and of sin to know better.
Pulling into a spot down the road, I could not yet see the lot to know who’d broken the Golden Rule. But I pictured old people a few hours later tripping over curbs and children in nice sweaters stepping around Natty Light cans, asking their parents if this is where The Devil lives as they trudged uphill, avoiding needles and mud, because some 25-year-old drummer didn’t want to walk.
As I rounded the corner with my bass and saw the gravel lot beyond the trees, eager to carry out God’s justice, I noticed a second car beside the drummer’s. This one, to my surprise, belonged to a woman. A kind woman who, when Elio was just home from the NICU, delivered us an aluminum pan’s worth of homemade lasagna despite barely knowing me beyond the few times a year we play music together at church. And I told myself: Brian, this is why you never judge books by their covers. Because, in this life, everyone except for Tim Keller (RIP) and Lionel Messi is capable of disappointing you.
While I didn’t want to be outright mean to her, I remained committed to the plan I’d hatched the moment I got Ben’s message. I would walk in jacketless at call time—not a moment sooner—with my cheeks red, rubbing my hands together to warm them from the 50-yard walk, and say, “Sorry I’m a little late, parking was brutal out there!”
Yet, as I pushed open the side door to get inside, a beam of light blinded my sight. It was so bright and yellow that I had to shield my eyes with my hands and turn away. When the light relented, my back was up against the inside part of the door. And while I seemed to physically be in the same place, it felt eerily like I was somewhere different.
This was confirmed a second later when, instead of Ben, I was greeted by a smiling bald man hustling toward the stage with a binder in his band. “Yours is already on stage, dude,” he said, as he climbed the short staircase with his acoustic guitar. I heard Amy Porter, who I hadn’t seen since my wedding day in 2018, giving instructions over the sound of the piano keys. And instead of a fiddle player or a mandolinist warming up on stage, there was a trumpet player, Brad something or other. (We were a different-sounding church then, more classical than folk.) Wade Jenkins was there, Byron McQuain was there. I was no longer in 2024. Somehow, I’d gone back in time to 2015.
Back then, the bald man—whose name is Matt Grimsley—was both our worship pastor and, as we completed the hiring process for Slate, the pastor we’ve had since, the dude responsible for taking care of our flock. “How are you doing?” Matt asked, kindly putting his arm around my shoulder as I plugged in, trying to figure out what had just happened. Neither the drummer nor the woman from the lot were anywhere in sight. “Have you been reading the book?”
I knew that Matt was referring to The Prodigal God by Keller, which he’d assigned me in August of that year during one of our counseling sessions before I’d left on a cross-country work trip. At that point, he and his wife, April, had been meeting with my soon-to-be ex-wife and me for a month. My divorce was imminent, though I refused to accept it. “I’m not going to be turned into a pillar of salt for bad decisions that weren’t mine,” I blurted out in one particularly tough session. I was angry, very angry—not so much about the dissolution of my marriage, but about the pain she was putting me through. And I sought to wield Matt and the church as God’s holy instruments for explaining to her the meaning of ‘til death do us part.’
When Matt gave me the book, insisting that I re-examine my feelings and consider how I might also be hurting others with my actions, I handed it right back. “I love Keller, you know that,” I said. “But I don’t understand how the prodigal son story is relevant to me right now. I didn’t turn my back on anyone. I’m Job. I’m Hosea. And you’re letting my testimony be ruined by not picking a side.”
“Trust me, you’ll find it interesting,” Matt said. “Read it, then when you’re back we’ll talk about it and see if God has shown you anything.”
I did as I was told, reading it until the day my ex and I met with the lawyer to draw up the agreement. I’d gotten back from my trip to find her and all her stuff gone. Chris King, who’d picked me up from the airport, walked with me through the empty house and watched me trying not to cry for how far my life had disintegrated compared to two years prior when I thought I’d be planting churches in foreign countries before 2020. Then he offered me a cigar, and we headed to the Old City to wander around and smoke.
I’m beginning to digress, so I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up and tell you The Prodigal God is about a story you’d recognize even if you haven’t ever touched a Bible before. I’ll set the scene. Jesus has just finished having dinner at the house of one of the town’s big-shot pastors, when, as he typically did around religious folks, he starts telling stories about how God’s kingdom works to annoy the pastor’s other guests, who were highfalutin.
He tells them about a farmer with two sons, the younger of whom asks for his share of the inheritance early. Once the check was cashed and his wallet bursting, he headed for the Red-Light District, taking less time than you’d think to empty his pockets in casinos on booze and hookers. Then, one day, he was on the side of the interstate after doing an odd job for a stranger with no pity when he decided to hitchhike home. “I’ll take the beating,” he muttered, trying to come up with what to tell his mom and dad to earn their forgiveness. “I’ll ask Dad to treat me like a slave or worse. I’ll live in the barn. I won’t ask for another penny ever again.”
He was still planning out his speech when his old man spotted him on the road. He’d been sipping sweet tea on the front porch, thinking, “It can’t be. It can’t.”—once he realized it was, he leaped from his rocking chair and sprinted barefoot in the dirt, tackling his boy to the ground. But he wasn’t angry. “You’re home!” he yelled, tears in his eyes. Seeing the old man rolling in the muck, the fieldhands and workers ran up behind to see what happened. “He’s home! My son is home! We need to celebrate.” The party lasted for days, with all the finest food, all the best drinks, and fiddlers playing dancing tunes until daybreak.
I never liked that story.
But Keller’s book doesn’t spend much time focusing on the little screw-up. Instead, it centers on his older brother, the one who was so busy building up the family business, building his dad’s empire, that he hadn’t even noticed the commotion until he’d come in well after quitting time, like he usually did, and saw the party vans dropping off the plates of brisket and cake.
Opening the parlor door, he saw his mom and dad with big, dumb smiles on their faces. Before he could ask, he saw his little brother sitting on the far side of the room with his head in his hands. Instinctively, he went his way, ready to swing on him, taking out a year’s worth of rage and injustice with his fists. “I’ll put him in the ground myself, if he ever comes back, pop,” he’d told his old man the week before. The patriarch was a shell of himself, staring out the window and praying into the flames before falling asleep alone in his big chair. “I can’t believe he’d do this to you. I’ll never leave you, pop. I promise.”
And the whole point of the book is to say this guy—the good guy who never turned his back, never wasted a penny of his dad’s money—was wrong.
“Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends,” the good brother told his dad in the Gospel account. “But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And his father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”
Even though the suggestion that what I interpreted as the natural reaction of a righteous son was as bad as sin made me furious, I knew inside what Matt was getting at. I knew it in 2015, just as I know it in 2024.
I’ve never been one to be awed by God’s love because I rarely felt I needed it. God’s power, his justice—that’s what I was in it for. That one day, everyone who’s ever thrown a beer can out their window, bullied the weakest kid in class, or parked in a spot they were asked not to will get theirs. And I will be on the right side of the Lord’s Courtroom. I’m hardly the first to think this; the brothers James and John, two of Jesus’s best friends, asked him to save a spot on his right and left side for them in Heaven.
“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them,” Jesus told the squad after James and John refused to accept they didn’t know what they were asking for. “But it shall not be so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Eventually, I went to wizz and when I got back onstage, Matt was gone. So were Amy and Wade. I texted Byron, who responded that it was 5 a.m. in Colorado. And two hours later, in the break between services, I saw the woman who’d parked her car in the gravel lot feeding her baby boy in the corner. She’d brought him with her (it took me until only a few months ago to bring Alba, who is 4, with me to church during rehearsals). Instead of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez during the second sermon, she read her Bible and took notes. And after our duty was over, she put her son back crying into his car seat while I drove home in the quiet, alone, listening to a podcast.
The point, if you haven’t figured it out by now, is that I’m a butthole. I cast stones without considering my own long list of sins. I make judgments based on hearsay or YouTube videos and don’t care about the whole story or the other side. I tell lies about how good I am when I am embarrassingly frail and so in need of God not to crush me under his meaty fist come Judgment Day. Most people deserve the benefit of the doubt (not drummers or frat bros, but everyone else, definitely). And I need to get a whole lot better at worrying about removing the log from my own eye before telling my brother about the speck in theirs.
See you next week!
Words from the Wise
“Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”
Tim Keller, The Prodigal God
Useful Trivia
What’s in a face? A heralded 2006 study by Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov found that it takes only one-tenth of a second for our brains to judge a person’s good looks or trustworthiness. Our intuitive response to faces is so rapid that reason may not have time to influence the reaction. Once a judgment is made, it rarely changes. Tough luck for us non-photogenic types.
More reading:
“Todorov explores the ‘Irresistible Influence of First Impressions,’” Princeton News
What I’m Reading
Almost done with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’m at about five-pages worth of progress a day before falling asleep with the book on my face.
As I felt I misjudged it on first read, and I enjoyed Pulphead so much, I am listening to John Jeremiah Sullivan’s first collection, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son, in the car. Still not a huge fan of the horse parts, though I enjoy the memoir elements a lot.
This week, in my media writing course at UT, I lectured on feature stories. I’ve included a reading list for students of about a dozen of my favorites, including Phil Hoad’s “Cat and Mouse” for The Atavist, about a pair of London pet detectives who set out to find a serial killer of felines. It’s great.
What I’m Listening To
Kings Kaleidoscope’s 2023 self-titled album.
Emily McCoy and Middlebrook Music’s 2024 worship album, Longing for the Garden, which sounds like Disney’s Pocahontas for Christians.
The band Arm’s Length, which, like Ben Quad, is a Gen-Z version of the heavy emo rock I loved in my teens.
What I’m Watching
The above summary in Economics Explained of the groundbreaking work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Haley and I are midway through the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. It’s getting cornier. But I’ll cleanse my palate with season 2 of Silo, which is on Apple TV as of last Friday.
Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year), buying me a coffee, or ordering a copy of my first story collection, Big Head on the Block. You can also listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.
Love this.