At the beginning of the semester, one of the first sermons I preach to my college students—and I’m not a clergyman—is when I tell them in no uncertain terms, by threatening, cajoling and sometimes pleading, that they better not use artificial intelligence to do their assignments.

I don’t want compositions or speeches done by artificial intelligence. I want the real deal, even if it’s flawed and has grammatical errors. I want their human creativity, not a sanitized, marginalized, homogenized piece of work from a supercomputer.

So call me a hypocrite, because I turned to artificial intelligence after Mass recently for an interpretation of the Gospel from Luke 6:27-38, where Jesus talks about love of enemies.

We’ve heard it thousands of times, but have we really heard it, or did it go in one ear and out the other, as my mother would say? Guilty as charged.

Jesus said: “To you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic … Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.”

What jumped out at me were the words: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.”

I wanted to see how AI interpreted those words. Here’s what I was told: “The passage suggests that judgment and condemnation are human consequences of human choices.” Huh? What does that mean?

Somehow, Jesus’ message didn’t come through the same when AI did biblical exegesis. The reason, perhaps, is that Jesus speaks to the heart, not to the computer.

As I see it, Jesus is offering us the deal of a lifetime—or more accurately, the deal of an afterlife time that you couldn’t possibly turn down.

I don’t plan to, so I began a personal campaign to stop judging and condemning. At the end of the day when I put my head on the pillow, I started taking an account of my behavior, sort of like the Examen of St. Ignatius Loyola.

Did I judge and condemn? Sadly, after I review my day, I’m left with a collection of condemnations and criticisms: over our elected officials, over the state of the world, over the way one person treated another person, over the rising cost of everything, over the person who didn’t do this and the person who did do that.

I even try to avoid taking full responsibility because I look for others to blame for my behavior. You see, my family members call me on their way to work, yelling and cussing about people on the road who cut them off or ran a stop sign.

Then, I have to listen to political outrage from both sides of the spectrum, all of which means to say, there’s a lot of condemning and judging. And I’m not even on social media, which is a hothouse of abuse, criticism and judgement.

We judge by worldly standards, but the good news is that’s not the way God judges. He sees the entire picture. A merciful God wants all of us—especially sinners—to have a seat at the heavenly banquet. He didn’t die for our sins so we could condemn others. He died for our sins to show infinite mercy.

I once knew a woman who was a pillar of the Church. (Reader alert: I’m about to judge someone.) She went to daily Mass, she prayed the Rosary, she was active in the Ladies Guild. And yet for all that, she spent her day condemning people who didn’t practice the faith the way she thought they should. It was painful to watch, and it was painful to hear, but more painful was the realization I was like her.

Some of my favorite sayings I borrowed from my father, who was a recovering alcoholic. Once he got sober, he had to start living a new life. He realized, given the way he had lived, that he was in no position to judge. You won’t find these sayings in the Gospels or Proverbs, but they’re worth remembering. He’d always tell me: “Take your own inventory” and “Live and let live” and my favorite,

“You can’t see the picture if you’re in the frame.”

So stop judging … and you won’t be judged.