Filth described her very well. While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was. Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy. These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that they themselves are a living manifestation of all those assorted tragedies. Sometimes we become what life has...
Filth described her very well. While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was. Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy. These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that they themselves are a living manifestation of all those assorted tragedies. Sometimes we become what life has done to us. Hers was a life that was already an abysmal collection of untold catastrophes that resulted in filth nearly indescribable. She was only fourteen.
Susan was of little note as she stepped off the bus that first day of summer camp. She was one of over one hundred campers swirling in an arriving mass of anticipation. Gathering tattered bags and a tattered spirit, her eyes were set hollow with the effects of a life lived in hatred. Filth and a pervading stench drew her apart from the rest almost instantly. Her soul seemed to reek with a putrid odor that handily eclipsed the smell emanating from her skin and clothing. There was about her an inner ugliness that permeated everything else about her, that had consumed her and had digested whatever shred of good there might have been. It all seemed to have effectively left the fragrance of any human goodness now consumed in the sludge of whatever it was that seemed to define her.
Her defense mechanism was so refined that she immediately repelled all who drew near, thrusting others so far away that she guaranteed her own isolation. Her own woundedness was so utterly complete that the poison of the pain she felt spewed in venomous rages at anyone who drew near. Her self-hatred was effectively projected outward onto anyone who dared draw near physically or emotionally. She seemed as something less than human, something abominable; something terribly horrifying within which any shred of humanity was consumed and utterly lost.
The following week of camp was to be marred by ugly confrontations. She devolved into assorted rages that were wild, brutish, entirely unprovoked and profuse. She refused to shower. Ferocious outbursts were filled with anger distilled into lethal poison that devastated other hearts, young and old. Physical assaults and violent rages had an insane wildness and a touch of insanity about them. There emerged at times something animalistic about her, something very primal that raged unrestrained by either reason or rationale. At times the line between that of a visceral animal and a human being was blurred and terribly ill-defined.
In the end, Susan was isolated in a lone cabin. Her parents refused to come and get her. Her pastor was unwilling and unable to deal with her rages as her life did not fit neatly into some clean theological rubric that he could manage. The camp staff gathering to pray for her, but found their prayers as ineffective. Some sort of spiritual possession was questioned, and rightly so. She was a monster; a raging pathetic monster that we waited to relieve ourselves of at the close of camp. Such was our judgment of her.
Judging From Fear
Judging is, I think, a manifestation of our own fears. We judge so that we might have some sense of control and some feeling of superiority. If we judge that which is before us, we assume we will not become whatever it is that we are rendering judgment upon. We set ourselves apart as distinct from that thing or that person with that distinction somehow convincing us that we are different. Judging places us above that which we judge, meaning that we will not succumb to it from our supposedly elevated position.
We judge because we fear, and because we fear we are not prone to look deeply into the person that we’re judging. For if we look deeply, we might see ourselves. We might be forced to surrender to the reality that that which we are rendering judgment upon is as much a part of that person as it is a part of us. Superficial judgment allows us to bypass our own humanity and live in the lie of superiority. The person whom we judge is then sacrificed to our thin self-serving judgments and whatever is it that God wanted to do in our lives through that person is tragically lost.
Judgment Revealed
It was to be that final night of camp. The next morning a mass of buses and cars would invade the gravel parking lot, snatching up sun burnt campers filled with the wild tales of a week’s adventures. But that would be tomorrow. For now, night had fallen, drawing up a warm blanket of thick summer air across the camp and out beyond the wooded expanse, tucking the world in at each horizon. Crickets sang in a chorus of the night from the deep woods, lulling the day to slumber with their mesmerizing notes. Frogs bellowed thick from a stream that meandered through a wooded ravine down a slight ridge. Their chorus hauntingly rolled up the rise and across the slight meadow. Lightening bugs cast dancing pinpoint pigments of yellow across the shadowy landscape and deep into the tall stands of sleepy timber. The moon had only shaken a sliver of itself awake, mingling with the starry minions. It was the perfect night; soft and subtle. God’s creation was melding into perfection.
With the campers bedded down for that final night, I strolled down to the chapel now bathed in the soft shadows of night. A few moments with God at the end of a long week seemed so right. Drawn, I descended the winding dirt and gravel path with the soft crunch of each step muffled by night’s thick softness. Slight shadows cut from the thin pastel light of a sleepy moon seemed to whisper something about reverence and what it is to be alone with God.
Another person had thought the same. The outdoor chapel was framed by a wall of river rock that extended muscular granite arms around an expansive gravel floor. Across the gravel expanse there stood a rock and timber altar with a muscular, rough-hewn cross as a shadowy sentry. Thick timbers supported a vaulted wooden roof spread with broad knotty pine boards. The woods beyond were alive with the night. And Susan was there.
A shadowy figure knelt at the altar. Her aloneness was poignant, an isolated life kneeling before an altar in a desperate hope of somehow breaking that isolation. The crying was soft and indistinct, being defy muted by her fear of vulnerability. The moment was a manifestation of a broken heart and deeply wounded spirit which had somehow collided with God enough to strike a spark of hope. She was kneeling there, her fingers embedded in the rock altar, hoping that this hope would not fail her as had everything else.
We had all seen her as ugly, despicable, the slimy scum of humanity that teetered on the savagery of a wild animal. We wanted nothing more than to see the sun break on the final day of camp and watch her leave both the camp and our lives. We could not wait to be rid of her, to relegate this vermin back to the hole from which she had crawled. To say we hated Susan was likely excessive. To say we despised her was likely true. And yet, here she was, broken. The wounded humanity she so vehemently lashed out from was pouring out across that rock and timber altar. Her core was exposed and for the first time I saw a slight glimpse of her humanity. I had errantly judged it not to be there for fear that I would recognize it in myself. Now I saw her brokenness and in it, I recognized my own.
I feared her, not knowing in that moment what to do; not wanting to do anything out of the fear of behaviors I’d observed and the hatred I’d seen spew from her. But I found myself walking toward her anyway. Having made no conscious decision to do anything, I stepped, my footsteps dictated by something wholly other than me. Suddenly I was beside her in the thick dark, in the thick of night; in the thick of her night. Without a word spoken, she reached up and took my hand and drew me down to her side with a force that buckled my knees. Putting a trembling arm around me as if the whole of her spirit was leaning its weight on me, I felt for that brief instance the intolerable hell of her life. And in that moment I understood why she was what she was.
Her words were to silence the night that surrounded us. Nature drew down into the moment, stood on tiptoe so it seemed as God reached out from the expanse of that starry night and changed a life.
Her next words set me back, instantly slicing through all the things that had caused me to judge her so harshly and revealing who this really was. She said, “would you pray with me?” Without a word from me her heart ruptured open in prayer. I never uttered a word. I didn’t have to as such an action would have been only an intrusion in that transforming moment. Massive floodgates surged opened and a enormous reservoir of pain that had accumulated over the incalculable expanse of years and events deluged the darkened chapel. I knelt . . . stunned. I had arrogantly diminished her in my judgments, and I experienced my own cleansing in hers. It was a marvelous and privileged moment.
In the end, we spent over an hour kneeling in the gravel, cloaked in a deep summer’s night. Her prayers, a lifetime tidal wave of events and circumstances kept coming; of abuse and neglect and drugs. The assorted maladies such as hunger, too few clothes, empty birthdays, numerous evictions and the rejection of society that abject poverty brings to a young life. There was a devastating abortion and a fathomless litany of other terrifying choices that shredded her soul. A father’s alcoholism, a brother’s suicide, and a mother’s incessant marital unfaithfulness layered in it all. Things that I could have never have comprehended. Hers was a devastated life beyond description; a human holocaust.
And it all poured into the night, across the rock and timber altar, down the gravel floor, out into the deep woods and into the expanses of heaven itself. When it was done, she was free and her core was cleansed. Likewise, I was free. In that chapel God gave me far more than I had ever expected as I had trod the dirt and gravel path earlier that night. I saw bits of me in her, and they were likewise swept away in her own release.
The next sunrise may have actually been her very first sunrise, the day dawning over a new life. With the sun barely warming the eastern horizon, she went to the shower. Her clothes were deposited in the washer. She combed her hair into long translucent waves, brushed her teeth bright and put on fresh clean clothes. A touch of borrowed make-up and a slight sprits of perfume rounded out the transformation. Arranging herself in the mirror, she gently primped herself to perfection.
Susan walked into the cafeteria for that final breakfast wholly new. Silence fell over one hundred campers. Its power was deafening. All of our superficial judgments had defined her for all of us. So complete were they that we all sat there trying to somehow make them fit this new person for, sadly, we knew no other way to define her. The old judgments of a monster melted away in the light of their gross insufficiency and a fresh understanding of this remarkable young woman seized the room. A litany of miracles walked in with her.
At that final breakfast she went from table to table to table. Asking for forgiveness from those she’d hurt. Weeping with those lives she’d scarred. Holding the faces of so many in her hands, looking intently into their eyes and telling them how sorry she was. Hugging and holding and crying with an endless array of campers and counselors. No one ate breakfast that morning because sometimes life becomes bigger than food and larger than any agenda. Sometimes life intersects us so powerfully that the only thing we can give attention to is that which intersects us. And Susan intersected us all.
A revival broke in that cafeteria. Clusters of young lives gave themselves to God over eggs, bacon and a radically changed life. Busses and arriving cars were asked to wait until the surge of one life changed had fully raced and run through the hundreds of other hurting lives that morning. The vast gulf between what we were and what we could be was searingly highlighted in Susan. And in the end, God ravaged the work of Satan and the deep pain of innumerable adolescents through the life of a single young lady who chose to see her core and live differently because of it. It was the most remarkable thing I have ever seen. A wretched and putrid life detested by those around her changing the very lives that had hated her, thereby leaving a legacy of life with those very lives.
An Errant Judgment
The rocks had dropped; one by one. Each thud stirred a slight wisp of talcum-like dust that quickly settled. With it, a slight wisp of hope and of life spun gentle eddies in her heart. Garbled whispering rose from the gathered cluster of angered religious leaders. Cutting glances rendered razor sharp with hatred were slung across the courtyard toward her. Righteous indignation wrapped itself like a robe around pious bodies. And then, a slow dispersing of those gathered in their robes and finery with the old leaving first. The sound of feet on departing gravel built and then gradually lessened as the courtyard was emptied.
Soon silence drifted in, leaving the scene littered still with lifeless rocks that attest to hatred halted and judgment deferred. All that was left was a prostitute and the Son of God. What remained was a broken woman human groveling in the acidic guilt of promiscuity . . . and Jesus. Wholeness and hollowness stood one on one.
Half naked, the hours had been truncated with deception, discovery, detainment and deliberation. Deep in an illicit sexual embrace, eyes were watching it all happen, peering past slightly parted curtains. A door stood ajar. Shooing away curious passer-byers, they collected visual evidence as to the unfolding offense under the guise of a righteous action while hiding the feeding of their own sensate passion by vicariously engaging in the heat of passion themselves. The trap was sprung. She was seized, a few loose garments were thrown around her naked body, heckles of debauchery were hurled at her and she was dragged away. Her partner somehow vanished as his purpose was fulfilled.
The religious leaders had now departed. Jesus slowly stood. His eyes, contemplative and soft, shifted from the marks scrawled in the dirt and were drawn across the empty courtyard. It is painful that people condemn in others that which they cannot accept in themselves. That somehow the act of condemning it in others supposedly frees them from that very same thing in themselves. They had in some way proven themselves invincible to whatever they were confronting because they had identified it and confronted in it another. In doing so, they somehow viewed themselves as insulated from that same thing.
In the oddity of facing our own filth, judging is most often not a necessary action, but an action initiated out of the fear that those judging might themselves engage in such horrific actions. Judging is too often a self-centered act designed to free the one judging from the belief that they will ever be consumed or controlled by that which they are judging. The sense of love that one might possess for another human being had succumbed to the fear of what oneself might actually do and the narcissism of self-preservation that arises out of that fear. It had all resulted in their judgment of this woman. The rocks that littered the court yard yelled it loudly long after those who had dropped them had exited.
Jesus drew a slight breath, paused and then turned. Before Him there now knelt a scathingly hollow human being. Few turn to the profession of prostitution unless there is wounding emptiness. There are few people in life who are so relentlessly hollow and hold such an unyielding self-hatred as those who ply her trade. She had likely arrived at this moment in time hollow and empty; in desperate need of a touch, of some slight affirmation. Receiving even a morsel of someone’s heart and life might have been just enough to pull her up and out of the life that she lived. Empathy instead of judgment; compassion instead of condemnation; love instead of legalism; someone who might look just a bit farther beyond the putrid exterior to see the wounded and bleeding person inside.
Men had used her, violating her for a few scant coins. They saw her only as an object upon which to release their sexual tensions and live out their distorted fantasies. They had been unwilling to see the person who died a little more after each illicit rendezvous. They didn’t care to see. They had judged her too, but they judged her differently. They had judged how she might be used by them and how the assets she possessed could be abducted in the vandalism of another human being.
Then there was the disgust of other men that was thrown out in taunts and heckling as she made her way through tight streets. Vendors refused to sell her goods. Still other men wanted to stone her, to kill her; to rid the world of her without understanding why she was who she was. All of them rendered their sordid judgments, each colored by their place of proximity and point of orientation to her life. It was the very same thing I had done to Susan.
Yet, here was a very different kind of man, the kind of man I would like to be. His example prompts and prods me to grapple with my inadequacies rather than judging those in the lives of others. His example convinces me that something human resides in even the most destitute of persons and that I must be diligent in seeking it out even when I can’t see it. I must do these things so that I might do the same as He did.
Jesus had no need to judge. He did not need to judge her to feel insulated against her atrocities. He had no need to elevate Himself over her to feel safe from that which had destroyed her. He was not concerned with advancing Himself or His interests at her expense. He simply saw her humanity, He protected it, and then He allowed it to be released rather than condemned by the rendering some sort of self-serving judgment.
He stood in the breech and turned the condemnation away. ”’Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’” (John 8:10), he said to her. A life of condemnation was suddenly still and hauntingly absent; she was entirely free of the condemnation that had satiated her life and shackled her heart. It was an odd and alien experience for her. She was no longer suppressed by the judgments of others that were designed to elevate them. She was not sacrificed out of the need of someone else to feel superior. She was not used so that someone else was satisfied in the using. She was freed to be different and to do different.
Often God intervenes in ways that are outside of our realm of experience. Often the very thing we need, we cannot conceptualize. But it is these very things Jesus brings to us. And in the perfect freedom of the moment that Jesus brings we find ourselves frozen. She was frozen and unable to look up. Her silence makes it clear. This man had turned away the wrath that had followed her all her life. The stones of judgment lay still in the dust. Their voices had been muted and she had no idea what to do in a relationship where she would not be judged.
Caught in the void, she attempted to somehow acclimate to what had happened. She floundered in the freedom because freedom is the place where judgment is absent. She was free to be who it is she truly was without the proclaimed judgments of others forcing her to remain who she was. She stammered with the words forming in the midst of mental groping and said, “‘No one, sir’” (John 8:11, NIV). It was just the two of them. Face to face with this man; alone in the courtyard of her life.
Our Courtyards
“‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin’” (John 8:11, NIV). It is not about judgment or punishment. There was no recitation of sins. No lengthy exposé on the spiritual and psychological implications of sexual sin. There was no need. All that stuff was clear. It was known. Her choices were not the point of discourse for they were only the manifestation of pain, not the pain itself. The lacerated core of this woman that had been heartlessly bludgeoned by so many others is what defined her. Not the outward appearances as they are only a product of those wounds. Not the manifestation of behaviors that are a part of all of that as well. Not her acts of sexual promiscuity. But the terrified and bloodied inner self that intentionally repulses all others at all costs so that wounded self will not incur further damage.
It’s about refusing to judge as judgment only sentences others to that which we’re judging them for. Rather, we need to take a wholly different tact and attempt to see past the behavior to the person behind the behavior so that we can release them from the wounds that so bind them.
Likewise, I have stood in many of my life’s own courtyards. There, in those places, inherent in me is the fundamental knowledge regarding my own nature and the manifest actions of that nature. I often pretend that to not be the case, rummaging forward through the accumulated filth of my life pretending not to know the reason for its accumulation. Playing dumb. Feigning ignorance. Judging others ruthlessly so that I think myself superior and insulated from being what they are, thereby escaping accountability and the possibility of their fate. But I know. I know full well.
But, those that condemn me have departed. The rightful punishment that I deserve is suspended. Justice as I perceive it has been placated and postponed. All that should be happening to me is not. And in the absence of judgment is freedom. God renders all judgment void because the cross consumes it all and renders it all as all gone. The distractions, demands and declarations of the world as it rails against my sin is rendered silent. Any judgments are unable to shackle me to my sin because all judgment has been suspended. Everything that would give me pause to defend defenseless actions is absent for there is no judgment against which I must defend myself. Every voice that would legitimately and rightly describe the repercussions of my behaviors have fallen silent. Justice is suspended in silence. And it is only God; my sin and God and the freedom to be different.
A Choice Freed from Judgment
What was her choice after Jesus turned and left? She stood there, aghast and in paralysis. The sunrise would likewise dawn an entirely new day for her. In the months and years ahead she would wash Jesus’ feet with her tears. She would attend to Him; push through the crowds that hailed Him and then condemned Him; follow Him through the pressing mobs and winding streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha. She would endure the eternity that seemed those three and a half hours on the cross. She would watch Him die, wait through that Saturday with angst indescribable, and be the first in all of time to see Him risen. Her life would be radically new in ways incomprehensible to her, being wrenched out of the bed of prostitution and propelled to partnership with the Messiah. All because Someone refused to bind her with His judgments and instead, sought her freedom.
The End Product
The bus had rumbled up the long gravel road of the camp, dust and diesel leaving a path attesting to its journey. The dust and diesel was now dissipating and thinning in a slight summer breeze. Clusters of birds raised a cacophony of song in the dense foliage of the surrounding woods. Golden sunshine rained from a generous sky of blue. Hundreds of sunburnt campers with suitcases, duffle bags and rich memories gathered in clusters around a myriad of cars, busses and vans that inundated the parking lot. In the departing mayhem there was a tug on my shoulder. A transformed face greeted me. This was not the girl that came off this same bus six days ago. Instantly I was in the grip of hug dripping with the love of a grateful heart. Long and rich, the hug was one of life and living. In the midst of the embrace, she whispered, “thanks so much. I’ll never be the same again.”
Her bus rolled off down that driveway, leaving a trail of dust and diesel as it had when it had arrived. On board was a miracle. God had gotten to the core of her courtyard and suspended judgment. There she seized the second chance. And it changed her forever.
Pondering Point
We judge based on externals. It’s easy that way. There is no expenditure of energy attempting to ascertain that which we cannot see. Seizing and evaluating the obvious is easy, convenient and simple. It allows us to render rapid judgment and avoid encountering a life at the core of that life. It’s cheap living that is superficial and thin. We do the same with ourselves. We are distant from our own cores. That however, is where Jesus meets us. Here, at the core of our courtyards we are afforded two things. Genuine repentance centered in the acknowledgment of our core, and then the chance to do something radically different; a wild departure into the fullness of life and the fullness of God.
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