Gerard Henderson makes this claim in the Sydney Morning Herald:
'The unfashionable fact is that nations which have paid heed to Catholic social teaching have had poor economic outcomes. Ireland and Italy come to mind. Ireland recovered from high unemployment only after it embraced economic reform. '
Justifiable? The rest of the article is very interesting too, on the right of Church leaders to make public comment and the inconsistency of politicians and journalists in supporting them when they do so.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Ruth Gledhill on Wycliffe
Well blow me down, Ruth Gledhill has written just about the only sensible article on the Wycliffe affair. Now, lets be clear - The Times has had a job to win me over after a frankly appalling article on the Sydney diocese a few years back (was it 20+ factual errors? I forget: it was basically copied it out of a hatchet job in Theology by a chap called Humphrey Southern). But this piece is a professional piece of journalism that doesn't make opinion into fact (Stephen Bates' stock-in-trade). Amazing!
IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the offending article was NOT written by Ruth Gledhill as I originally claimed but by her colleague Mary Ann Sieghart. It is a true shocker (a 'Barry Crocker' as we call it back home). See for yourself:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mary_ann_sieghart/article830129.ece
IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the offending article was NOT written by Ruth Gledhill as I originally claimed but by her colleague Mary Ann Sieghart. It is a true shocker (a 'Barry Crocker' as we call it back home). See for yourself:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mary_ann_sieghart/article830129.ece
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Reporting on the church
An interesting article on media reporting of church matters - from a Roman Catholic perspective - is here. It responds in the first instance to the woeful reporting of the alleged union between Anglican and RC churches last week, which was based on... what exactly?
Friday, February 09, 2007
Les Murray's Collected Poems
[Yes, English readers: there are Australian poets who write about subjects other than sport...]
It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)
I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.
I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.
…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)
When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)
He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:
In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)
This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).
Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:
Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)
He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."
It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:
Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)
Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.
Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:
In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)
Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).
There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.
It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)
I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.
I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.
…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)
When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)
He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:
In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)
This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).
Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:
Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)
He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."
It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:
Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)
Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.
Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:
In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)
Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).
There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
mike carlton
Well, back from holidays: Cornwall is wonderful!
Here's something that has been sitting on my chest for a while.
Sydney journalist and talk-back radio host Mike Carlton has for a couple of years lampooned the Jensens in his Sydney Morning Herald column on a Saturday. His satire is based on Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and takes the form of a mock parish newsletter. It would be amusing if we were not the target! I have wondered long and hard how to respond. Carlton is impervious to letters, of course and refuses to meet up to discuss it. Somehow, humanising your targets takes the fun out of tearing them down in public, doesn't it?
The premise of the entire lampoon is the charge of nepotism that Herald journalist Kelly Burke aired some time ago. The source of the charge was Rev John Cornish, the former head of Anglicans Together. He grumpily commented in this way on the appointment of my uncle as Dean of St Andrew's Cathedral and then my mother as a member of a women's ministry committee and my appointment to Moore College. I rang up John Cornish and asked him what evidence he had about my appointment to suggest that it was nepotistic. Of course, he had none, but that did not mean that he issued any kind of public apology - nor has he since. My mother's position is not a job at all, but membership of a committee on which several other women sit, and she receives no payment. My uncle - who is widely regarded as one of the more successful rectors in Sydney in the 80s and 90s to say the least - was not the first person asked to be the Dean, but in any case would have deserved consideration on merit alone. (Cornish's gripe was with his churchmanship). In any case, no-one who knew anything about it saw the Dean's job as anything but an extremely difficult task with little thanks. Anyhow, it doesn't matter now: Cornish's slur has gained a life of its own, and appears everywhere in its distorted form as fact. I hope he is happy.
This is what is galling about Carlton's method. He is an 'opinion' writer. His business is not to report but to comment on the news. He evidently has not the time for his own research or fact checking. All he does is read the SMH and go from there. And that's the problem! As anyone with first hand experience knows, the SMH is notorious for publishing inaccuracies and perpetuating myth. Carlton's fatuous comments are then built on this. It is ignorance by convenience because the facts would get in the way of his satire. He refuses to speak with any of us face to face because it would spoil the fun.
A recent example: the Herald published a distorted, incomplete and one-sided account of an upcoming defamation suit against an Anglican rector, and linked it bizarrely to the women's ordination debate. Because it was a lawsuit, it was impossible to respond to the inaccuracies at all. And yet Carlton has the temerity to use this as material for his latest squib, further cementing in the public's mind the orginal distortions perpetrated by the paper.
I have to say that it hurts to read it. I don't say that we ought to be spared criticism but it is hard when it is based on such baloney. It is hard when you meet people whose view of me and my family has been coloured by this. And it is hard when Carlton is in such a position of power and a far larger platform for expressing his views than we have. Where is the right of reply?
What comforts me? Well, Carlton's attacks on the Howard government (of which I am no fan) seem to be wildly out of touch with most Australians. He is one of those baby boomer journalists who think they invented sliced bread and that their opinions are self-evidently true - and yet can't see how out of touch they are with most people. I also have to remember that the journalist's ravings are like the wind: here today but wrapping paper tomorrow. And also, I remember that a few barbs from the likes of Carlton are nothing compared to what Christians face in the Sudan right now.
Here's something that has been sitting on my chest for a while.
Sydney journalist and talk-back radio host Mike Carlton has for a couple of years lampooned the Jensens in his Sydney Morning Herald column on a Saturday. His satire is based on Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and takes the form of a mock parish newsletter. It would be amusing if we were not the target! I have wondered long and hard how to respond. Carlton is impervious to letters, of course and refuses to meet up to discuss it. Somehow, humanising your targets takes the fun out of tearing them down in public, doesn't it?
The premise of the entire lampoon is the charge of nepotism that Herald journalist Kelly Burke aired some time ago. The source of the charge was Rev John Cornish, the former head of Anglicans Together. He grumpily commented in this way on the appointment of my uncle as Dean of St Andrew's Cathedral and then my mother as a member of a women's ministry committee and my appointment to Moore College. I rang up John Cornish and asked him what evidence he had about my appointment to suggest that it was nepotistic. Of course, he had none, but that did not mean that he issued any kind of public apology - nor has he since. My mother's position is not a job at all, but membership of a committee on which several other women sit, and she receives no payment. My uncle - who is widely regarded as one of the more successful rectors in Sydney in the 80s and 90s to say the least - was not the first person asked to be the Dean, but in any case would have deserved consideration on merit alone. (Cornish's gripe was with his churchmanship). In any case, no-one who knew anything about it saw the Dean's job as anything but an extremely difficult task with little thanks. Anyhow, it doesn't matter now: Cornish's slur has gained a life of its own, and appears everywhere in its distorted form as fact. I hope he is happy.
This is what is galling about Carlton's method. He is an 'opinion' writer. His business is not to report but to comment on the news. He evidently has not the time for his own research or fact checking. All he does is read the SMH and go from there. And that's the problem! As anyone with first hand experience knows, the SMH is notorious for publishing inaccuracies and perpetuating myth. Carlton's fatuous comments are then built on this. It is ignorance by convenience because the facts would get in the way of his satire. He refuses to speak with any of us face to face because it would spoil the fun.
A recent example: the Herald published a distorted, incomplete and one-sided account of an upcoming defamation suit against an Anglican rector, and linked it bizarrely to the women's ordination debate. Because it was a lawsuit, it was impossible to respond to the inaccuracies at all. And yet Carlton has the temerity to use this as material for his latest squib, further cementing in the public's mind the orginal distortions perpetrated by the paper.
I have to say that it hurts to read it. I don't say that we ought to be spared criticism but it is hard when it is based on such baloney. It is hard when you meet people whose view of me and my family has been coloured by this. And it is hard when Carlton is in such a position of power and a far larger platform for expressing his views than we have. Where is the right of reply?
What comforts me? Well, Carlton's attacks on the Howard government (of which I am no fan) seem to be wildly out of touch with most Australians. He is one of those baby boomer journalists who think they invented sliced bread and that their opinions are self-evidently true - and yet can't see how out of touch they are with most people. I also have to remember that the journalist's ravings are like the wind: here today but wrapping paper tomorrow. And also, I remember that a few barbs from the likes of Carlton are nothing compared to what Christians face in the Sudan right now.
Friday, March 17, 2006
liberal political philosopher Rawls....
John Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person. Conversion is irrelevant to our public, or institutional, identity’.
This is a revealing comment: Rawls’ liberalism in effect asks citizens to exhibit a fissure in their identity. This is repeated mantra-like by media boffins everywhere - here in the UK and at home in OZ. (Mike Carlton I am thinking of you). Though Rawls recognises the anthropological/psychological problem here, he offers no satisfactory resolution from that perspective.
The public sphere is not the zone of neutrality he assumes. Quite clearly, Rawls allows a preferred position for certain kinds of truth and not for others in determining what goods society is to pursue. And yet the religious person might rightly protest that without consideration of God at this very point, the kinds of goods that belief in God might entail are deliberately excluded from consideration – and that these beliefs are not easily privatised.
What do you think?
This is a revealing comment: Rawls’ liberalism in effect asks citizens to exhibit a fissure in their identity. This is repeated mantra-like by media boffins everywhere - here in the UK and at home in OZ. (Mike Carlton I am thinking of you). Though Rawls recognises the anthropological/psychological problem here, he offers no satisfactory resolution from that perspective.
The public sphere is not the zone of neutrality he assumes. Quite clearly, Rawls allows a preferred position for certain kinds of truth and not for others in determining what goods society is to pursue. And yet the religious person might rightly protest that without consideration of God at this very point, the kinds of goods that belief in God might entail are deliberately excluded from consideration – and that these beliefs are not easily privatised.
What do you think?
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
A sermon preached in Moore College Chapel, Tues 6th Sept 2005
Judge not
Do not Judge, that you may not be judged!
We cannot not judge.
Judging is a human necessity; and when we’re told we must not judge we risk losing something irreplaceable. You cannot have justice without judgment; we must not imagine that by, refraining from acts of judgment, justice will be delivered and good order upheld. That simply is not possible.
And to have judgment, you must have a judge, or judges: judgment, which is necessary for justice, depends on the activity of judging: naming things as they truly are, discriminating between right and wrong, rewarding, and punishing. There needs to be a business of judging done by people who judge – whether it be officials appointed to the task of administering the court system or the primary teacher awarding grades to her students.
And yet, right now, where we live, judging smells very badly.To judge is understood in the vernacular as to condemn: and as such, it is the activity of bigots and hypocrites. It carries the flavor of a generation now thankfully sitting out their days in nursing homes with blankets over the knees. It is the opposite of “open-mindedness”, that great contemporary absolute. “A mind is like a parachute”, as the bumper-sticker says: “it works better when it’s open”.
People fail to distinguish between judgment and prejudice, in other words. Judging – as it is currently misunderstood - puts the judge in a position of superiority and places the judged under them; and feeds all our worst fears of power and abuse. Judging applies the private preferences and choices of one individual to another, and so threatens to compromise the individual’s sacred right to judge for him- or herself.
And perhaps worst of all: judging breeds hypocrisy, the great sin of politicians and churchmen alike. Isn’t the person who readily judges, we suspect, ignoring or, more than likely, covering for some deficiency in their own character?
The Jerry Springer Show is a fine example of this bizarre desire to show reserve in judgment at all times. He parades before his audience the most ugly and contorted freaks he can find and has them unravel their twisted lives toe-to-toe with each on stage. And then he delivers a little homily at the end, having remained impassive throughout; and his little homilies say nothing other than “emotions do run high when love is concerned, don’t they?” He would never say “infidelity is wrong and these people are messing up their lives and the lives of those around them”: it wouldn’t cross his mind to be so, well, judgmental.
We might expect more help from Jesus. But he says: “do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. No teaching of Jesus has been more often turned on his disciples by those outside the church. This verse has been graffitied on Moore College’s walls. People who were not Christian feel that here they have a good case against those that are in accusing them of not following the teachings of their Lord; for Christians have been very good at judging. By asserting that there are objective, even God-given, moral standards of human behaviour Christians are implying that those who do not share those standards are to be judged. Instead, in this teaching, direct from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a Jesus who appears tolerant and accepting. We judge: he says do not judge.
But what is Jesus actually saying? Is he really warning against any human decision that might privilege one way of looking at the world over another, or one way of behaving over another? Is he really advocating indiscriminate acceptance?
Certainly, the people of Israel had been given authority to judge civil disputes and an office of judge to enact judgment (Lev 19:15; Deut 17). And it was lack of judging that was held against Israel in the prophets – Jeremiah 5 provides one example of many. It was neglect of the function of justice in their community that was so culpable: the distorting of justice lead to the distorting of the community of God’s people – the neglect of orphans and widows for example.
And Paul adds his voice to the call for God’s people to judge, and judge soundly. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, he says that Christians ought to judge one another as those who will one day judge the world. Sound judgment is needed to maintain the purity of the people of God, lest they be corrupted by the appalling behaviour of the man who was living with his father’s wife - on whom Paul himself pronounces judgment.
But Jesus says, do not judge. Can he really mean this? I am well aware of the tendency of Christian interpreters to take shortcuts with Jesus’ radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount – like the preacher I once heard who said “this is the standard we can’t keep; just as well justification by faith comes in and makes up the difference”; or the school of commentary which seems to be designed to show how Jesus is not saying really what he is saying actually. It will not do to let us off the hook so easily.
But we ought to remember what target Jesus has in his sights here. He takes aim at the kind of stony-hearted legalism that admits of no give or take, the judging that is self-righteously punitive and applies standards to others that are different to the standards applied to the self. This is the kind of judging that results in the bizarrely comical picture of the person with the log in his eye pointing out the speck in the eye of his neighbour. It is judging in its condemnatory aspect that it is on view here: the kind of judging that writes the other person off on the slightest pretext without subjecting itself to the same scrutiny. It is the attitude of the Pharisee who sees the wretched Tax Collector at the temple and says “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Funnily enough, despite all the fear of judging in our culture, we actually delight in this sort of judging. On Saturday I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is a remarkable movie of a terrific book. Enjoyable as the story was, it was an old-fashioned morality tale, where we are free to enjoy the horrible fates meted out to horrible kids such as Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop, who was sucked up into a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate – as well he might be. It makes us feel so good to know there is someone morally inferior to us because they are fat. The pleasure of the story is the self-righteous pleasure of siding with the innocent Charlie in condemning all those awful children who get their just deserts.
The Mobile Phone has become the instrument of judgment as we given the chance by reality TV to judge the moral behaviour of contestants and have them ritually humiliated and removed from our screens. The crowing of the media vultures over the carcass of politician John Brogden was another example. Who among us is not guilty of making a tasteless remark? Clearly the Telegraph would have sold a lot of papers if they had followed through on the story by publishing yet more rumours after his resignation; clearly readers take great pleasure in the moral collapse of a person. Brogden’s suicide attempt brought an end to that caper. But the disturbing reality is that the media’s actions were a reflection of the readiness to judge without mercy that lurks within the soul of this community. We love to judge; but we are without a public mercy.
And yet the eschatological consequence of this type of judging is perfectly clear: do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Your condemnation of others is ultimately the reason for your own condemnation. It is this sort of judging that brings down the judgment of God, for it usurps the judgment that belongs to God. As Jesus goes on:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The promise of the measure is that, by judging, you are building your own gallows. There is an ultimate judgment and this is performed by the ultimate judge. And if you think to treat others severely and without remorse, then so shall it be for you too. If you are unable to forgive another, then don’t think that forgiveness will be accorded to you. If you are unable to exercise grace in your judging, then don’t imagine that grace will be shown you. It’s the lesson of the ungrateful servant of Matthew 18 who is forgiven a small fortune, yet presses the debt of one who owes him a tiny amount.
The other side of the coin is given to us in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” A sign of receiving the gospel is the preparedness not to judge, but to forgive. Of course, forgiveness involves a kind of judging itself; it discriminates between right and wrong and good and evil. As ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes: “ ‘Judge not’ is…not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness.” Jesus’ command transcends the false dichotomy that our culture has of judging and tolerance, and exposes its hypocrisy.
Which is the point: judging begins with God and is delegated temporarily to us. We do it imperfectly, but necessarily. All human judging takes place in anticipation of God’s final judgment and recognizes that human judges are to answer for their judging. And so Jesus’s warning is well given: before you pass judgment, hesitate. Pause and consider that you will face the divine judge who judges perfectly – the judge who has no favourites. Human judging ought to begin with a judging of the self: attending to the speck - all is it a log – in my own eye.
We cannot not judge. It is our calling as human beings to judge in the sense of “properly discriminate”. In fact, life is filled with thousands of daily discriminations. Judging preserves and builds individuals and communities. But human judgment takes place as a delegated task and recognizes its own provisional nature ahead of the final judgment.
As pastors who hold out the hope of the gospel we ought to model this judgment with mercy. There are many people in our community who would not dare darken a church building because they are divorced, or living in a de facto relationship, or homosexual, or smokers, or whatever, and they reckon they would feel judged by the people in church. Can we wield the word of God in such a way as we show that we too are subject to it and that discriminating between right and wrong does not mean condemning someone like a disused building? The messages we church people send to our community is that we are in the business, not of pursuing good, but of reveling in our condemnation of other people. What are we doing to counter this impression?
We would do well also to listen to James, who writes:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbour?
How quick we are to condemn one another. How soon we forget that ultimate judgment is not our domain. How long we hold grudges. How soon we declare, even just to ourselves, that someone is beyond the pale. I say this of course looking at you through several logs in my own eye. Jesus’ warning is for us to heed: though we cannot not judge, and must judge, we must do so as those who will be judged and whose only hope is the perfect mercy shown us by the Judge himself. How could we who have been shown grace not show that grace to others?
notes: I got some stuff from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. in First Things.
Judge not
Do not Judge, that you may not be judged!
We cannot not judge.
Judging is a human necessity; and when we’re told we must not judge we risk losing something irreplaceable. You cannot have justice without judgment; we must not imagine that by, refraining from acts of judgment, justice will be delivered and good order upheld. That simply is not possible.
And to have judgment, you must have a judge, or judges: judgment, which is necessary for justice, depends on the activity of judging: naming things as they truly are, discriminating between right and wrong, rewarding, and punishing. There needs to be a business of judging done by people who judge – whether it be officials appointed to the task of administering the court system or the primary teacher awarding grades to her students.
And yet, right now, where we live, judging smells very badly.To judge is understood in the vernacular as to condemn: and as such, it is the activity of bigots and hypocrites. It carries the flavor of a generation now thankfully sitting out their days in nursing homes with blankets over the knees. It is the opposite of “open-mindedness”, that great contemporary absolute. “A mind is like a parachute”, as the bumper-sticker says: “it works better when it’s open”.
People fail to distinguish between judgment and prejudice, in other words. Judging – as it is currently misunderstood - puts the judge in a position of superiority and places the judged under them; and feeds all our worst fears of power and abuse. Judging applies the private preferences and choices of one individual to another, and so threatens to compromise the individual’s sacred right to judge for him- or herself.
And perhaps worst of all: judging breeds hypocrisy, the great sin of politicians and churchmen alike. Isn’t the person who readily judges, we suspect, ignoring or, more than likely, covering for some deficiency in their own character?
The Jerry Springer Show is a fine example of this bizarre desire to show reserve in judgment at all times. He parades before his audience the most ugly and contorted freaks he can find and has them unravel their twisted lives toe-to-toe with each on stage. And then he delivers a little homily at the end, having remained impassive throughout; and his little homilies say nothing other than “emotions do run high when love is concerned, don’t they?” He would never say “infidelity is wrong and these people are messing up their lives and the lives of those around them”: it wouldn’t cross his mind to be so, well, judgmental.
We might expect more help from Jesus. But he says: “do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. No teaching of Jesus has been more often turned on his disciples by those outside the church. This verse has been graffitied on Moore College’s walls. People who were not Christian feel that here they have a good case against those that are in accusing them of not following the teachings of their Lord; for Christians have been very good at judging. By asserting that there are objective, even God-given, moral standards of human behaviour Christians are implying that those who do not share those standards are to be judged. Instead, in this teaching, direct from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a Jesus who appears tolerant and accepting. We judge: he says do not judge.
But what is Jesus actually saying? Is he really warning against any human decision that might privilege one way of looking at the world over another, or one way of behaving over another? Is he really advocating indiscriminate acceptance?
Certainly, the people of Israel had been given authority to judge civil disputes and an office of judge to enact judgment (Lev 19:15; Deut 17). And it was lack of judging that was held against Israel in the prophets – Jeremiah 5 provides one example of many. It was neglect of the function of justice in their community that was so culpable: the distorting of justice lead to the distorting of the community of God’s people – the neglect of orphans and widows for example.
And Paul adds his voice to the call for God’s people to judge, and judge soundly. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, he says that Christians ought to judge one another as those who will one day judge the world. Sound judgment is needed to maintain the purity of the people of God, lest they be corrupted by the appalling behaviour of the man who was living with his father’s wife - on whom Paul himself pronounces judgment.
But Jesus says, do not judge. Can he really mean this? I am well aware of the tendency of Christian interpreters to take shortcuts with Jesus’ radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount – like the preacher I once heard who said “this is the standard we can’t keep; just as well justification by faith comes in and makes up the difference”; or the school of commentary which seems to be designed to show how Jesus is not saying really what he is saying actually. It will not do to let us off the hook so easily.
But we ought to remember what target Jesus has in his sights here. He takes aim at the kind of stony-hearted legalism that admits of no give or take, the judging that is self-righteously punitive and applies standards to others that are different to the standards applied to the self. This is the kind of judging that results in the bizarrely comical picture of the person with the log in his eye pointing out the speck in the eye of his neighbour. It is judging in its condemnatory aspect that it is on view here: the kind of judging that writes the other person off on the slightest pretext without subjecting itself to the same scrutiny. It is the attitude of the Pharisee who sees the wretched Tax Collector at the temple and says “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Funnily enough, despite all the fear of judging in our culture, we actually delight in this sort of judging. On Saturday I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is a remarkable movie of a terrific book. Enjoyable as the story was, it was an old-fashioned morality tale, where we are free to enjoy the horrible fates meted out to horrible kids such as Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop, who was sucked up into a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate – as well he might be. It makes us feel so good to know there is someone morally inferior to us because they are fat. The pleasure of the story is the self-righteous pleasure of siding with the innocent Charlie in condemning all those awful children who get their just deserts.
The Mobile Phone has become the instrument of judgment as we given the chance by reality TV to judge the moral behaviour of contestants and have them ritually humiliated and removed from our screens. The crowing of the media vultures over the carcass of politician John Brogden was another example. Who among us is not guilty of making a tasteless remark? Clearly the Telegraph would have sold a lot of papers if they had followed through on the story by publishing yet more rumours after his resignation; clearly readers take great pleasure in the moral collapse of a person. Brogden’s suicide attempt brought an end to that caper. But the disturbing reality is that the media’s actions were a reflection of the readiness to judge without mercy that lurks within the soul of this community. We love to judge; but we are without a public mercy.
And yet the eschatological consequence of this type of judging is perfectly clear: do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Your condemnation of others is ultimately the reason for your own condemnation. It is this sort of judging that brings down the judgment of God, for it usurps the judgment that belongs to God. As Jesus goes on:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The promise of the measure is that, by judging, you are building your own gallows. There is an ultimate judgment and this is performed by the ultimate judge. And if you think to treat others severely and without remorse, then so shall it be for you too. If you are unable to forgive another, then don’t think that forgiveness will be accorded to you. If you are unable to exercise grace in your judging, then don’t imagine that grace will be shown you. It’s the lesson of the ungrateful servant of Matthew 18 who is forgiven a small fortune, yet presses the debt of one who owes him a tiny amount.
The other side of the coin is given to us in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” A sign of receiving the gospel is the preparedness not to judge, but to forgive. Of course, forgiveness involves a kind of judging itself; it discriminates between right and wrong and good and evil. As ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes: “ ‘Judge not’ is…not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness.” Jesus’ command transcends the false dichotomy that our culture has of judging and tolerance, and exposes its hypocrisy.
Which is the point: judging begins with God and is delegated temporarily to us. We do it imperfectly, but necessarily. All human judging takes place in anticipation of God’s final judgment and recognizes that human judges are to answer for their judging. And so Jesus’s warning is well given: before you pass judgment, hesitate. Pause and consider that you will face the divine judge who judges perfectly – the judge who has no favourites. Human judging ought to begin with a judging of the self: attending to the speck - all is it a log – in my own eye.
We cannot not judge. It is our calling as human beings to judge in the sense of “properly discriminate”. In fact, life is filled with thousands of daily discriminations. Judging preserves and builds individuals and communities. But human judgment takes place as a delegated task and recognizes its own provisional nature ahead of the final judgment.
As pastors who hold out the hope of the gospel we ought to model this judgment with mercy. There are many people in our community who would not dare darken a church building because they are divorced, or living in a de facto relationship, or homosexual, or smokers, or whatever, and they reckon they would feel judged by the people in church. Can we wield the word of God in such a way as we show that we too are subject to it and that discriminating between right and wrong does not mean condemning someone like a disused building? The messages we church people send to our community is that we are in the business, not of pursuing good, but of reveling in our condemnation of other people. What are we doing to counter this impression?
We would do well also to listen to James, who writes:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbour?
How quick we are to condemn one another. How soon we forget that ultimate judgment is not our domain. How long we hold grudges. How soon we declare, even just to ourselves, that someone is beyond the pale. I say this of course looking at you through several logs in my own eye. Jesus’ warning is for us to heed: though we cannot not judge, and must judge, we must do so as those who will be judged and whose only hope is the perfect mercy shown us by the Judge himself. How could we who have been shown grace not show that grace to others?
notes: I got some stuff from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. in First Things.
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