“I cannot do anything on my own;
I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just,
because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.”
~ John 5:30 (emphasis mine)

The Gospel of John has a lot to say about Jesus and judgment, about Jesus and condemnation. He didn’t come to condemn us, but to save us. God gave Him the power of judgment, but He doesn’t just use it willy-nilly. His judgments are all true. They are all just. They are all…simple, in a way.

Think about it. When we talk about human judgment, we’re usually talking about a decision we’re making about something. It it good or is it bad? Morally right or morally wrong? Preferable or not? Is this something to seek or something to avoid? Something we can easily forgive or something that makes indignation burn within us?

Our judges have to make decisions, give verdicts. Their judgments can be contested and appealed. Judges can be unjust…greedy…bought…biased. So if we’re considering judgment in the light of our very human and often fallible terms, then…yeah. Judgments are changeable, not necessarily just, and definitely a decision that can be swayed–and not just by facts. Judgments can be swayed by emotion just as easily.

Something occurred to me recently, though, when I read that passage in John again. Perhaps it combined in my mind with a passage from the end of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, when the character is finally granted an audience with the gods and is allowed to list her complaints. In the book, the mere listing of them in that environment does a miraculous thing: her own bias is removed, and the facts–the facts that she had interpreted one way–are suddenly clear. She can suddenly see the truth of those facts. She knows what they mean. She understands them. And so, when the gods ask her if she still has a complaint, she says no.

That’s what true judgment is, and that’s the kind that God holds in His hands, and which He gave to Christ. It isn’t a decision. There’s no “judgment call” to be made. He sees the simple TRUTH of each fact. He knows our motivations, our desires, our fears. He knows what we intended and what we didn’t. God, when He judges humanity, isn’t up there uncertain about what He’ll say to us. Our facts speak for themselves; and Christ speaks for us too…if we let Him.

Because there’s no selfishness in Jesus. There’s no greed. There’s no bias. He simply stands at our side and loves us. He pours His precious blood over us. And suddenly, our facts–our sins, our victories, our joys, our sorrows, our failures, our successes–are all crystal clear but redeemed.

Maybe for some of us, that’s comforting–that God isn’t some angry judge just itching to condemn us. That He simply sees the truth: the simple, complicated, complete, unveiled truth of us. He sees it, and the simple facts equal simple decisions. But for others, that might in fact be scary. We want a judge we can convince. We want to smile and bat our lashes and appeal to the emotions of those sitting in judgment over us. We want to be able to keep the secret things secret and only tell the things we want them to know, bending them in a way favorable to us.

We won’t have that chance when we’re before the Father. But we also won’t need it.

I don’t honestly like being asked to judge things, whether it’s the best of kids’ science fair projects or whether someone should do this or that, and certainly not whether so and so should be condemned for alleged crimes. Because I never feel like I have all the facts. But God…He does. And that makes His judgments what all judgments should be: just and true.