Pope: the measure, Christian or worldly, used to measure others shall be used to measure us

“’With the measure with which one measures [others], one shall be measured’, the same measure. If it is a Christian measure, one that follows Jesus on his path, one shall be judged the same way, with a lot of empathy, a lot of compassion, a lot of mercy. But if my measure is worldly and I only use the Christian faith – doing the right thing, going to Mass, and yet living like a worldly person – I shall be measured with that measure.”

Vatican City (AsiaNews) – “God will judge us with the same measure we have for others,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Mark (2:21-25). Following this, Pope Francis too, in his homily during the morning’s Mass in Casa Santa Marta, said that we shall be judged with the same "measure", Christian or worldly, with which we measure others.

All of us have to come to terms with life, Francis explained, in the present and above all, at the its end, and Jesus’s words remind us “just how that moment will be", namely a time of judgment.

Whilst the passage on the Beatitudes and Chapter 25 in the Gospel of Matthew show us "the things we have to do", how we do them, the "style with which we must live", its "measure" that is, "is what the Lord says here”, in the above passage.

“To what extent do I measure others? To what extent do I measure myself? Is it a generous measure, full of God’s love, or is it a low-level measure? And I shall be judged with this measure, not another, right the one I use. At what level have I placed my bar? At a high level? We have to think about it. And we see this not only or not so much in the good things we do or in the bad things we do but in [our] extended lifestyle.”

For Francis, each one of us has a style, "a way of measuring oneself, things and others”. And it will be the same one the Lord will use with us. So whoever measures selfishly will be measured the same way; whoever has no mercy and "is capable of trampling on everyone's head” to get ahead in life, will be judged in the same way, that is, “without mercy”.

Conversely, the Christian lifestyle goes in another direction. “As a Christian I wonder what the reference stone, the touchstone is, in order to know if I am at a Christian level, a level that Jesus wants? It is the ability to humiliate myself, it is the ability to suffer humiliation. A Christian who is unable to bear the humiliations of life is missing something. He is a superficial or self-interested Christian. 'But why so father?' Because Jesus did it, he emptied himself. As Paul said: ‘he emptied himself [. . .] to death, even death on a cross'. He was God but did not insist on that: he emptied himself. This is the model.”

To illustrate the "worldly" lifestyle, unable to follow the model of Jesus, the Pope cited the "complaints" the bishops report to him about the difficulty they have transferring priests to “low-end” rather than high-end parishes, which some priests view as a form of punishment.

This is how we recognise “one’s style" and “one’s way of judging", from what one does when facing humiliations: "A worldly way of judging, a sinful way of judging, a business-like way of judging, [or] a Christian way of judging.”

“’With the measure with which one measures [others], one shall be measured’, the same measure. If it is a Christian measure, one that follows Jesus on his path, one shall be judged the same way, with a lot of empathy, a lot of compassion, a lot of mercy. But if my measure is worldly and I only use the Christian faith – doing the right thing, going to Mass, and yet living like a worldly person – I shall be measured with that measure.”

The pontiff concluded the homily asking “the Lord [for] the grace to live in a Christian way, above all not to be afraid of the cross, of humiliations, because this is the way he chose to save us and this is what guarantees that my measure is Christian: the ability to bear the cross, the ability to suffer some humiliation.”

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