This week’s art—a stylized Ten Commandments—and theme—righteous judgment—really threw me off. I was expecting a legalistic selection of texts highlighting, once again, the trope that God punishes you when you sin. Instead, it was a nod not just to avoiding judging others but to our inability to judge each other, rightly, in any case.

2 Samuel 12:1-10. We miss David arranging for the murder of Bathsheba’s husband so he can marry her, coming in just as the prophet Nathan is confronting for his sin. Nathan tells David the story of a rich man who steals a poor man’s only lamb for dinner instead of killing one of his own, enraging David with the injustice of it. Then the turn: Nathan tells David that he is the rich man who has stolen Bathsheba, the poor man’s lamb. His family line is cursed to live by the sword as a result. But isn’t living by the sword in the job description of a king? And I’d love to know how Bathsheba felt about being turned into a sheeple.

Psalm 139. One of the best psalms in the book and an early move toward the doctrines of God’s omniscience and omnipresence. This one’s a favorite of pro-lifers for its “you knitted me in the womb” language. So much of inward-looking Christian spirituality has roots in this chapter. I’ve read this one several times over the years, but I was still surprised by the sudden turn to a call for vengeance and admission of “total hatred.” The psalmist asks God to correct him if he’s wrong, but clearly he thinks his hatred is right.

Romans 12:12-21. More evidence that Paul was familiar with Jesus’ ethical teachings, not just Good Friday and Easter. Judge not, the passage urges, even hate not. Let God take care of taking revenge, Paul says.

Luke 18:9-14. Jesus tells the story of a Pharisee’s self-righteous, and public, prayer and a tax collector’s humble prayer. God accepts the prayer of the tax collector, not the Pharisee. He closes with the cosmic reversal: the great will be humbled and the humble exalted.

I’m troubled by the teaching that only God is capable of judgment. I’m more than willing to admit that we are less than capable of perfect judgment, but aren’t we capable of good-enough judgment? Maybe I hung around ethicists too much, but I think that it’s good and necessary to make ethical judgments and to put the force of law behind them in many cases.

This need to let God be the final judge is the driver behind the doctrine of the Last Judgment. But I’m much more inclined to Miroslav Volf’s that what’s needed at any day of future arbitration isn’t judgment so much as reconciliation. Perfect reconciliation is of course not possible for us, and often even imperfect reconciliation is impossible. I understand the longing for a day of Last Reconciliation and see Volf’s thought as an ultimately hopeful turn on one of Christianity’s more despairing doctrines. But I don’t know that that makes it true.

I’m taking some time to follow along through the Christian year using the new Mosaic Bible, which has several biblical and extra-biblical selections for each week of the Christian year.