Do Not Judge

Do Not Judge

Matthew 7:1-5

This morning is our final Sunday of our long walk through the Sermon on the Mount.  As I suggested at the outset, this set of materials is not so much a single sermon that Jesus preached as it is a summary of his teachings.  If Jesus came to show us how to live a life of faith, the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ invitation to us to see what that path of faith might look like and how it might be different than other, more popular, paths to walk.

In the world, it is very popular to align ourselves with the winners:  the rich; the powerful; those who seem untouched by loss; those whom everyone admires.  Jesus, from the outset, says that the path of faith is different.  He stands not with the winners but with the folks so many people consider losers:  the poor, the humble, the persecuted, those who grieve, the sick.  These are the people whom Jesus stands with in life.  Jesus essentially looks us in the eye and says, “If you’re going to follow me, then you’re going to learn to stand with those people, too.”

When it comes to us, Jesus says we are the salt that gives life, itself, flavor and that we are the light of the world.  Our job is to add that flavor and to let that light shine.  However, there are things that can get in our way.  Our anger can eat us alive.  Things like adultery and divorce and the heartfelt desire for revenge can tear us apart.  Jesus says that we not only need to control what we do but we need to deal with what we feel in such a way that those feelings do not fester inside of us.  Jesus sets the bar high:  “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’”  As followers of Christ we are called to be disciplined, the kind of discipline that stares down the temptation to hate and refuses that invitation.

So, we are supposed to care about the people no one else cares about.  We are supposed to look inside of our hearts and minds and act on something other than impulse and being like everyone else.  Finally, we are supposed to give and pray and fast as privately as we can.  If you’re going to give, give in a way that elevates the person in need rather than a way that says, “Hey, look what I just did!”  If you’re going to pray or fast, do those things privately with an eye toward your relationship to God rather than an eye on how many people are watching you.

So, despite everything you may have seen that was labeled as “Christian” but made you cringe, this faith is not about getting what we want.  Rather, this faith is about reaching out to those who need us.  This faith is not about justifying righteous anger with our brothers or sisters or neighbors or wars against our enemies.  Rather, to follow Jesus, we need to deal with a whole host of destructive feelings and learn, instead, to walk in peace.  This faith is not about pious public displays that are designed to help us win friends and influence people.  Rather, this faith is about cultivating a daily relationship with God in which our “under the radar” acts of faith are simply the ways that we nourish that relationship.  That relationship is what will keep us on the path as we walk through a very complicated world.

Here’s the final kicker:  following Jesus is not about getting to judge everyone else:  “Do not judge so that you may not be judged.”  In my favorite alternative translation, called, “The Message,” Eugene Peterson translates this verse this way: “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment.”  So, I don’t get to hang with the cool people.  I don’t get to act on my worst impulses like everyone else.  I don’t get to practice my faith for all the world to see.  And…and…I don’t get to judge people?  Come on, Jesus!

Seriously, pause for a moment here.  So, Imagine that you walk up to someone on the street and ask them, “Hey, what do Christians do?”  You might get a host of answers.  “They help people in need.”  (Oh…good answer!)  “They go to church on Sunday.”  (Bingo!)  But if you looked them in the eye and gave them a little nudge and said, “Come on, bro…what are Christians really known for?”  The most likely answer would be, “Christians are judgmental.”  I think in public life, the most common sighting of a Christian will be on some moral or social issue, pronouncing judgment.  You might agree with the judgment and think, “You go, girl!”  Or you might object to the judgment and think, “What gives?” However, like it or not, the fact that there is a Christian standing in front of you passing judgment just seems like an everyday event.

All of this is what makes Jesus’ words today so striking:  “Do not judge!”  Next to last week’s text in which we were told, “Do not worry,” “Do not judge” might be one of Jesus’ most counter-cultural instructions.  After all, what’s the point of being good if it is not to get to point out who is bad?  Don’t Christians get to stand on the moral high ground, nose in the air, and look down on those who are tainted?

Nope!  “Do not judge.” Let’s try thinking about this in this way.  First of all, God doesn’t love us because we deserve to be loved more than someone else deserves to be loved.  God loves us, warts and all.  When God loves us, warts and all, God chooses not to judge us.  Seriously…the oldest news in the world is that if God decided to judge us, we would not have a leg to stand on.  (Entire denominations have devoted themselves to scaring us with this truth!) Of course, this is true of anyone else who chooses to love us, too.  We are not irresistibly lovable.  We are all a piece of work and a flawed one at that.  So, here’s God who chooses to love us, not judge us.  Here are the other folks in our lives who have chosen to love us, not judge us.   Here we are in our best moments fully aware of how incredibly lucky we are to be loved at all.  And yet…we somehow come to the conclusion that what we are called to do is to judge everyone else, including, sometimes, the people who love us and the God who loves us, too.  Seriously?  Really?  We think that’s our job?  We think that’s our right? 

There are major problems with being judgmental.  First and foremost, if we think our job is to judge someone, we will stand off at a distance from them and size things up.  We will analyze what’s wrong with them.  We will prepare ourselves to offer helpful tips on what they could do differently.  We will gather a short list of their obvious shortcomings and share them, whether they want to hear the list or not.  The problem with all of this is that our job is not to judge that person but to love them and help them.  You don’t love someone by standing back and sizing them up.  You love them by leaning in, by asking caring questions, by learning what they are going through.  Just doing this—amazingly—is often enough to help someone—just treating them as a person who matters, just by listening to their story.  However, sometimes we will even get to go a step further than this and actually do something else to help them.  (Every now and then, against all the odds, what we do to help might even actually help!)  Judgment just gets in the way of loving and caring and helping.

The other problem with believing that judging is our job is that we are not very good judges, not nearly as good as we think.  This is so obvious that Jesus actually has a great time urging us to see this comic truth about ourselves.  We’ve all been around the person whose zipper is down and been faced with the question, “Do I say something and, if so, what do I say?”  We’ve all been with someone who had the piece of spinach stuck in their teeth.  We kind of make that gesture to our own teeth in the hope that they’ll get the point.  Well, Jesus says that when it comes to judgment, it’s like this:  you want so badly to help someone get the speck out of their eye that they don’t even seem to know is there.  However, what you don’t know is that there is a whole log sticking out of your own eye.  Jesus says that step one is to get the log out of your eye.  (Really, if you’ve never done it…take a minute and consider just how silly the person with the log in their eye would be!  Then, ask yourself, what if that person is you?)

So, the problem with thinking its our job to judge everyone around us isn’t just that this makes us forget our real job (to love, to care, to help.)  No, the problem is bigger than that.  If we get busy judging everyone else, we forget to examine ourselves.  We lose the need to be self-critical.  And if I cannot take an honest, self-critical look at myself, then I am never going to grow, not as a person and certainly not as a person of faith.  My job is to love God, love my neighbor and love myself.  If I am incapable of taking a long. hard look at myself, then all I will do is keep making the same mistakes over and over again.  At the least, as I like to remind myself, I ought to make some new mistakes every now and then.  At the least, I ought to love myself enough to try to become a better self, even if I fail spectacularly. 

We’ve all known people who clearly consider themselves to be better than everyone else.  When you’re in that person’s company, do you ever think to yourself, “Wow…that’s who I want to be!”  Do you ever think to yourself, “That’s who God created them to be?”  I don’t think so.  Those conclusions are reserved for the moment when we are in the company of someone who is selflessly caring for someone else, especially someone who otherwise would have been overlooked.  It’s the nurse who carefully cleans up the patient and the bed after an embarrassing “accident” who in the process restores someone’s dignity and respect.  It’s the friend who is there for someone in their most broken moment who, instead of offering up an, “I told you so…” asks, “How can I help?” and clearly means it.  It’s any person who happens upon any other person’s moment of brokenness who doesn’t seize the moment to put someone in his or her place but instead stands and affirms that person’s worth.  These are people following Christ’s path…

We’ve also all probably known the person who can’t say, “I’m sorry!” who can’t acknowledge, “Boy…did I ever make a mess of things.”  Maybe, we’ve all been that person at some point in time.  Sooner or later, though, we have to crawl down off the pedestal.  We have to rejoin the human race.  We have to acknowledge our own propensity for self-centeredness.  However, maybe even more often, we have to just acknowledge our own blindness:  “I didn’t even try to take account of the ways in which you are different than me and your experience is different than mine.  I just assumed that you secretly wanted to be like me this whole time.  Now, I have to tell you how horribly painful it is to see how wrong I’ve been.”

To follow Christ, is to make a commitment to a life of love and care, a life where the hope is to be helpful.  To follow Christ is to seek out the overlooked and the ignored, the broken hearted and the persecuted, the sick and the hungry and the thirsty.  To follow Christ is to let go of the so-very-human tendency to criticize and instead humble ourselves and recognize that we are just as broken as everyone else.  Then, we can create the shared space in which God can heal us all.