A Critical Heart Is a Miserable Heart

Dinner wraps up, and you hug your friends goodbye. Pulling out of their driveway, you feel caffeinated by all that your observant eyes noticed during dinner. You burst with “insightful” judgments, confident your spouse is thankful to be with someone so in tune with human nature.

In reality, you dissect your friends with an unfriendly scalpel, filleting their lives like frogs in biology class. Who knew they were suckers for organic groceries! Boy, chores would improve their kids! You reach home with three to five solutions for your frogs’ — I mean, friends’ — shortcomings. But somewhere deep, you know that dragging their names through the mud served to elevate your own.

There’s a thrill in pointing the finger, an addictive high in analyzing the supposed sins and oddities of others. American author Flannery O’Connor cast “misfits” across her short stories to serve as easy targets for the proud to trample. She recognized how often, in attempts to feel better about ourselves, we find so much wrong with others.

A critical spirit runs through the history of the world: The snake bad-talked God, Adam blamed Eve, Cain despised Abel, Ham shamed Noah, and so forth. Of course, criticism can be true and worth thoughtful mention. (Just think of Nathan with David.) But so often, our criticism tries to exchange the target on our backs for a crown that belongs solely on God’s head.

Let’s stop and confess: Playing judge and jury is antithetical to the gospel.

God, the Gracious Judge

Part of the gospel’s good news is that at our worst, Jesus’s blood “speaks a better word” (Hebrews 12:24). We are the ultimate misfits, but he wants us. God had every right to deliver us to final, instantaneous death. The Trinity could have delighted in our demise behind locked car doors. But instead, the Father went public with his love and grace when he “put forward [his Son] as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:25). Our redemption wasn’t a fluke, the result of catching God on a good day; rather, “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). God doesn’t nitpick dead frogs. He brings them back to life.

The gospel is reason to move toward others with an awareness that we limp. Jacob didn’t have much good to say about Esau. Jealous of what belonged to his older brother, Jacob schemed with his mother behind tent flaps. A lot went down that made Jacob run far, far away from his family — until God met him in an unexpected tussle. With a dislodged hip and a new heart in place, Jacob declared, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered” (Genesis 32:30).

“We cannot follow Jesus if our eyes follow everyone else.”

Sweat lingered on Jacob’s brow when he saw Esau approaching after a heated lifetime apart. Esau must have wondered at his brother’s changed appearance and manner: The proud schemer now limped like a horse broken in and at rest. If we have wrestled with God and received his mercy, it follows that we will extend that same mercy to others. We approach our Esau as a fellow sinner and sufferer, not Judge Judy.

Serve and Follow

Jacob limping toward Esau is a memorable script-flip, but Jesus limping toward us is a sight that kills the “fun” of high-and-mighty people-watching. Do we dare stand over our neighbor with arms crossed when Jesus limps toward us in his humanity — or, as John Calvin says, “stoops” to accommodate us like a nurse baby-talking the child in her arms?

In the Gospels, Jesus’s love has a limp as he “hopes all things” while he “endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). He hopes the best for us while willingly suffering the worst. For our part, we can continue to analyze the fascinating behavior of others, but only if our analysis is baptized in the hopeful, enduring love of the gospel.

Remember, Jesus lived close to the earth, doing the day-to-day with his disciples. He heard plenty of “friendly gossip” and uncensored judgment. Look at how he redirects his disciples on two occasions.

Serve Others Instead

The first occurs in Matthew 20:20–28, when the mom of “the sons of thunder” (who must have been quite the firecracker herself) asks Jesus to assign her two boys the best seats in the kingdom. The other disciples huff and puff at such audacity. Jesus stops them, pointing out that they are no longer part of the world’s rat race; paradoxically, the kingdom of heaven honors the slave. Even the Son of God came to serve and “give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).

Here’s Jesus’s redirection: When tempted to cut friends down to size, or to justify annoyance with spot-on judgments, serve instead. Serve by listening, waiting, forgiving, believing the best. Serve by overlooking, asking more questions, confronting. Serve like Jesus, who did so unto death.

Follow Jesus Instead

The second redirection is in John 21:20–23. Jesus lets Peter in on some hard things ahead of him. Peter spots John nearby, who is especially close to Jesus, and wants to know if he’ll have it just as bad. Jesus responds, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” (John 21:22).

We cannot follow Jesus if our eyes follow everyone else. Chances are, if we spend significant time dwelling on our neighbors’ irksome habits and measuring their blessings against our own, we see little of God. Jesus redirects our gaze. If we study God’s infinite beauties, then when Jesus says, “Follow me!” no one will be able to stop us.

Love over Slander

Unless we actively view other people and ourselves in light of the gospel, our critical tendencies will balloon until we’re well-rehearsed faultfinders lying on our deathbeds. The gospel is the antidote. We declare to our neighbor and ourselves: Jesus loves the misfit (with 1 Corinthians 13 hope and endurance). We follow this lover to the ends of the earth, and serve people we’d rather slander. The world will stop and stare at the Jacobs who no longer rob their brothers, but limp to embrace them.