BEFORE YOU JUDGE…

29/365

Today’s reflection hangs on the back of this excerpt from Nathan’s rubuke of David after the incident with Bathsheba and Urriah in 2 Samuel 12 . He tells David a parable about a rich man too stingy to take an animal out of his own herd to prepare for his visitor but instead opted to bully his poor neighbour out of the single ewe lamb he had.

When David’s opinion was solicited about the matter in question, he exploded in anger and said to Nathan “As surely as God lives, the man who did this ought to be lynched! He must repay for the lamb four times over for his crime and his stinginess!”

In David’s mind, the man had sinned and deserved to die. Never once was there a thought of ‘that could be me’. He looked at it only through the scope of a judge’s lens.

But then Nathan retorted:
“You are that man!”

Sometimes we completely forget something God never does ‘that we are human’, and that in a different turn of events, we could find ourselves in shoes of the people we throw stones at’.
Let’s strive then to become people of mercy, not just judges with stones in hand ready to launch an assault.

#sly