Do not judge

“Do not judge”, said Jesus (Matthew 7.1).

When Jesus said, “do not judge others” (GNB) he meant ‘do not be judgmental’. We are not asked to surrender the judgment of discernment, but we are called to surrender the judgment of condemnation. We are not to pretend that we know God’s verdict on other people’s lives. The reality is that there is so much we do not know or understand about others. There is always what my mother used to call OFM: that it is to say, the ‘one fact more’ which may totally change our view of the person concerned. As William Barclay wrote:

The fact is that if we realized what some people have to go through, so far from condemning them, we could be amazed that they have succeeded in being as good as they are.

Yet, even if we did know all the facts, it is not our place to pass judgment, for that is God’s prerogative. Instead we are to be merciful. According to Frederick Dale Bruner, “do not judge” is simply the fifth Beatitude in reverse: “Blessed are the merciful”. Significantly in Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, the command not to judge (Luke 6.37) is preceded by the command “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6.36), and then followed by the command to “forgive, and you will be forgiven”.

Sadly, too many Christians appear to have difficulty in showing mercy. In the words of Stanley Jones, a great Indian missionary, “Most religious people are not merciful toward the failings and shortcomings of others. Their very passion for righteousness makes them hard”. Douglas Hare, an American commentator, wrote: “Harsh and petty fault-finding becomes a corrosive chemical that erodes relationships wherever people have to work together to achieve common goals”.

After Jesus said, “Do not judge”, he went on to say, “and you will not be judged”. It is in fact in our self-interest to be merciful and not to be judgmental. For as Jesus made clear, there is an element of reciprocity at work. As Eugene Peterson put it in his paraphrase of the opening verses of Matthew 7:

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults – unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbour’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own face. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you’, when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole travelling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part.

Judgmentalism can be incredibly dangerous. For, as F.D. Bruner, wrote, “the slide rule that we apply to approved and unapproved behaviour is taken from our hands at the Judgment and applied to us”. Furthermore, a judgmental attitude towards others can exclude us from God’s pardon. We are not to live in the delusion that God forgives our sins when we do not forgive the sins of others. Remember the words of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, “forgive us the wrongs we have done, as we forgive the wrongs that others have done for us” (Matthew 6.12 GNB), Jesus went on to say:

If you forgive the wrong they have done to you, your Father in heaven will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive the wrongs you have done. (Matthew 6.14,15 GNB)

Jesus went on to attack the judgmentalism of the religious people of his day when he said: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye…” (Matthew 7.3-5). In other words, before we begin to notice the wrongs of others, we need to notice the wrongs in our own lives. Before we seek to put right other people’s lives, we need to put our own house in order. In this regard my mind goes to the story of the woman who was caught in bed with another woman’s husband. The Pharisees were all for condemning her to be stoned to death, but Jesus said: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8.7), and as a result one by one they went away (John 8.9). Jesus then said to the woman: “Go your way and from now on do not sin again” (John 8.11b).

To sum up, at the end of human history we will all stand before God the Judge, and we must not expect mercy from God if we are not merciful to others.