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.