If you’ve never tried making these lists, you might think it’s pretty easy—but it’s not. It requires making all sorts of fine distinctions regarding various criteria.  
 
Yes, making distinctions seems both practical and necessary and, at times, entertaining. It’s hard to imagine a world without it.
 
However, to be foretold is to be forewarned, as we heard in our Second Reading from the Letter of St. James.
 
“. . . have you not made distinctions among yourselves 
and become judges with evil designs?”
 
St. James describes a scenario in which the wealth and social status of people attending an assembly determine where each person gets to sit—a criterion he calls “evil.”
 
A strong word—especially when you consider it is something we always do.  
 
Often, our behavior toward others is not the least bit consistent.  The people we need something from, the people who impress us, the people we are attracted to—they get our best self, our kindest self, our most attentive self.  
 
But other people, especially the people we don’t have much use for?  Well, they get our crabby self, our impatient self, our mocking self, and even, at times, our cruel self. 
 
That’s how so many of us (myself included at times) interact with the people around us.  Some get a lot of our love.  Some get a little.   And some get almost none.  
 
So how do we decide?  When is it perfectly ok to rank, judge, and make these distinctions, and when is it not?
 
First and foremost, the clearest example of when it is not only ok but necessary to give people preferential treatment is when it comes to the people for whom we are directly responsible. 
 
For most of us, that means children, spouses, parents, students, employees, and parishioners. 
 
We owe them a different level of care and concern than we do others, so neglecting them to serve somebody else is probably never the right thing to do.   I think most of us would agree.   (And I hope God does, too!)
 
But what about everyone else?  Does it ultimately depend on where we’ve ranked them on our “list”?  We know who the people high on our list usually are—people like ourselves—people who can serve our self-interest.  People, we want to impress.  People who flatter us. People we need in some way.  
 
But then there are so many others much further down the list, the ones who are invisible to us, the ones we ignore, the ones we dislike, the ones whose cries fall on deaf ears.
 
Thank goodness the deaf man had people in his world willing to help, care for, and advocate for him.  
 
It would have been easier to do what so many others in the ancient world did all the time—blame physical ailments and afflictions on divine disfavor—and therefore give them justification for ignoring him or shunning him or leaving him to fend for himself.  A deaf man was a ‘bottom of the list” sort of guy.   
 
Fortunately, our God has no such lists.  God makes no such distinctions.  It sounds crazy, but that is who God is.  That’s how he sees.  That’s how he acts. And that’s what he expects from us.
 
I know what you are thinking. What about God’s judgment? What judgment will each of us need to face someday? 
 
Well, for one thing, we don’t know much about how it comes about, or how we are to understand it. But make no mistake— whatever this judgment is, it’s not a measure of how much God loves us, how much he cares for us, or whether or not he wants to be with us.  
 
In a certain sense, it’s more about God accepting the judgment we have already rendered on ourselves and, just as importantly, the judgment we render on others. Put simply, when we reject and ignore others, we reject God.
 
So, let’s see others the way our loving God sees others, hear the cries of others as loud as God hears them, and thereby start chipping away at the walls we have spent a lifetime constructing.
 
“Be opened!” Jesus said those words to a deaf man two thousand years ago and says the same to us today.