Of Criticism and Affirmation

If you remem­ber the temp­ta­tion story in the Gar­den of Eden, it was the scene in which the tempter planted a word of crit­i­cal doubt. He cou­pled it with a lit­tle bit of dis­tor­tion and some spin, then prob­a­bly repeated it until it worked. The tempter brought noth­ing new to cre­ation — just unpro­duc­tive chaos. He accom­plished his sin­is­ter pur­pose. The rest of the Bible illus­trates this theme. Evil has many facets, but at heart it is the spirit of neg­a­tive crit­i­cism. It offers no valid alter­na­tives. It only cri­tiques what is…as if it sat on God’s throne.
The cre­ation account was sum­ma­rized with, “And it was very good.” Then came the temp­ta­tion scene. It is more than just a story about how evil began. It is how it con­tin­ues to run. The Gar­den of Eden story has a thou­sand mean­ings. One of those is cer­tainly about our inner and outer crit­ics. We all know that there is a valid place for legit­i­mate cor­rec­tion, but that is a long ways from the power plays that lurk behind social, polit­i­cal, or per­sonal crit­i­cisms.
Humans have a weak­ness for crit­i­cism. We are all sus­cep­ti­ble to doubt. We are a lit­tle uncer­tain about what it is to be fully human. A sting­ing crit­i­cism can send us reel­ing. The tempter knows the Achilles heel in every­one. We over-believe our author­ity fig­ures, thus we set our­selves up for some really dev­as­tat­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties. We allow our­selves to be vul­ner­a­ble, and the critic’s dag­ger finds its mark.
Jesus’ crit­ics used a lot of ridicule (so com­mon in our con­tem­po­rary are­nas). Their crit­i­cisms all had some almost valid points in them. They took his words out of con­text. They finally had to resort to bla­tant lies and mur­der to stay in power. In the end, they had no love to offer the peo­ple under their care — only crit­i­cism for the One that truly did.
Affir­ma­tion is at the heart of spir­i­tual heal­ing. The mal­ady is to believe the critic rather than the Cre­ator. Despite reality’s flaws — real or imag­ined — the essence of life is “very good” and to be respected and embraced. “Judge not…” is pretty good advice. It is espe­cially good when you dis­cover you have become your own worst critic.