[Matthew 7:1-5]
Judge Not
By the Reverend Tom Paine
Preached Trinity Sunday
at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Chehalis
May 26, 2024
Welcome to a new sermon series this summer on passages in the Gospels that never come up in the Revised Common Lectionary. While I love the lectionary and believe, overall, the lectionary is a very helpful tool, at different points in my ministry I have ventured off to go into something in more depth. One summer I did a series on the Beatitudes. One summer I did a series on Acts of the Apostles. One summer I covered the life of King David. I just, as a preacher, like to be able to sometimes dig a little deeper into a topic longer than the lectionary stays. But it is a challenge to do this, especially nowadays, because there are abundant lectionary based resources on the internet. I won’t be able to use those this summer. And I don’t presume to know what other preachers out there, even ones you have heard from this pulpit, have preached on. But these passages are one I have never preached on.
The passage for today, as you heard, is not an unfamiliar one. It is no obscure reading. As a matter of fact, one verse from it is so well known many of you likely by heart remember the old King James Version rendering, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
Many non-Christians are aware of it too. So when did Jesus say this? What did he mean? How exactly do we apply it today? This is what I hope we can dig into today.
In the year 2000, Lesley and I got to go to the Holy Lands with a church group and, believe it or not, the setting of our passage was my favorite place during the whole trip. Every place we went was historic. Every place we went had something in the Bible important happen there. But so many of the other places were crowded. They were so crowded you could see a group leaving in front of you and would soon see a group arriving behind you waiting for you to be finished. Not so, in this place.
Where was it? It was near Nazareth, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, and is actually named the Mount of the Beatitudes. It was peaceful. It was not rushed. And you could actually take time to imagine Jesus being there and teaching.
The context of our passage is at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is found relatively early in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s ministry–following his baptism by John the Baptist and his temptation in the desert and his call of his first four disciples. The sermon is one of the most widely quoted sections of the Gospels and contains many of Jesus’ best known sayings (such as the beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer). Our reading comes from how he ends the Sermon on the Mount. And I do need to say, in Jesus’ similar Sermon on the Plain, we do get this teaching, and that one comes up in the lectionary once every three years, right before Lent. But, even with that, I think this teaching is worth some attention.
Lesley is really into genealogy. One person recently she found out a great deal more about is her great grandfather and she thinks her family never knew his whole background. She smiles and says, “there’s a story there they didn’t know.” I think she hits on something important that is a part of this teaching Jesus offered to cap off the Sermon on the Mount. We might be presumptive if we think we know enough to really evaluate another person. Even more importantly, we might be very wrong if we think they can never change. Or that we might have made the mistakes someone else made if we were in similar circumstances. And we like to simplify things by locking people into a certain time or decision they made and have that define them.
John Murphy, a minister in our presbytery, when reflecting on this passage says that we all – by nature – prejudge people. We assess who they are and what their background means when we initially meet them. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is by our nature to do that. But that’s also not what prejudice is. Prejudice means that we lock in all those prejudgements of people and we will not allow them to change. Who is this person? We decide who they are and nothing is going to change our opinion. Or we decide they cannot change. We do prejudge. Yet, most of us recognize that we, as God’s people, are not called to be prejudiced. It is not a good characteristic to have.
Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, and in a similar sermon he offered on the plain, established a new criteria for an ethical response. This isn’t meant to replace what is found in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is meant to take it to the next level. And fundamentally it has to do with seeing the image of God in our neighbors and not presuming they are somehow inherently inferior to us or that we are in a position to judge them because perhaps we need work too – maybe more than they do. Consider who he uplifted in his sermon – those who mourn, the meek, those who seek righteousness, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and the people who are insulted – few of those things are what people yearn for for themselves. Yet, Jesus was and is encouraging empathy as a core characteristic of being one of God’s children. Who drew Jesus’ attention? All those types of people he listed in the beatitudes. Again, our reading is supposed to be the icing on the cake. We are to not only recognize that God loves such people, and doesn’t judge such people, but that we are to love them and not judge them either. Jesus did teach us about God but he also weighed heavily into who we are supposed to be.
While this is a well known teaching of Jesus, I found relatively little written on it. And what I did find was often a quick assurance that Jesus wasn’t telling us to be non-discerning. Indeed, some of the essays or sermons I read seemed to be bending over backwards to want to assure Christians it is ok to look out for yourself and not assume the best in other people. And while I agree that Jesus wasn’t calling on us to be naive to the dangers that exist interacting with other people in the world or to fail to recognize that their aren’t people out there that seem to revel in what is evil – that Jesus absolutely was and is calling on us to try to better understand our neighbors and to work on our own failabilities versus judging others.
So how can we break this teaching? We can do so in many many ways. To start, we can break this command every time we start off thinking the worst of others. We live in challenging times with increasingly complex situations. But when we run to the lowest explanation of why people believe what they do or act in the way they do, we are moving in the opposite direction of what Jesus taught us. We break this command when we only speak to others about other people’s faults or listen to others lay out the faults in other people for us non-stop. And that is ever so easy to do and find in our politically and socially charged atmosphere we exist in today. We can see no good, hear no good, and say no good about people who are different from us. When we do this we are definitely getting off course. We are also going away from Jesus’ teachings when we judge entire lives of people only by their worst moments, or in how they responded to a really bad situation. When we forever lock our image of a person into one bad moment – that is the opposite of being empathetic. We break this command when we want to fill in the blanks of other people’s motives when we really don’t know their motives. Again, it is always about assuming the worst. We break this command when we judge others without considering ourselves in their same circumstances. Many of us are who we are through the education and life experiences that we have. Do we really think we would not be different if we grew up in a different house, in a different part of the country, or maybe in another country? Or in a different faith tradition? Or a different gender? Or a different race? Or was in a different economic class?
Lesley also told me her pastor once growing up preached on the speck in the eye versus the log and how Jesus often taught using hyperbole. A speck is so small, it is hard to see. A log wouldn’t exactly fit in someone else’s eye socket. But Jesus is exaggerating by pointing out that if we want to worry about flaws and failures – it is our own flaws that might indeed be the most significant and that is where our attention should rest.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, we break this command when we forget the last part of what Jesus taught – that we indeed are going to be judged. And the criteria – the way – we are going to be judged is already set. We might think, “Sure, well God is very graceful.” But Jesus didn’t teach we were going to be judged by God’s grace but by our own!
The amount of grace that will be shown to us is going to amount of grace we offer in our lives. So, how much is that? How much have we been graceful to one another in church? How graceful have we been to strangers outside of the church? How about, how graceful to people who are different from us? People of other religions? How graceful have we been to our enemies? Jesus seemed to think those were important questions for each of us to answer.
Ironically, it tends not to be people inside but outside of the church remembering Jesus saying, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” They lift it up ironically. Because many many people have felt judged by people in the church. But they might have the wrong idea too. Jesus wasn’t teaching that anything goes.
Again, our tasking is not to have a Pollyanna and naive approach. There are folks out there that do not have our best interests at heart. There are people out there on destructive paths that we know aren’t good. There are people out there that will try to take advantage of us. Jesus was aware of all this. Indeed he faced people who plotted against him, who denied him, and even betrayed him. He even knew people around him were going to have him arrested and executed. He predicted it. But it didn’t change his teaching. The way we can help bring about the kingdom is to offer the grace offered to us. To work on ourselves and try to understand our neighbors even as we stand for what we understand to be right.
Jesus’ “judge not” teaching here means that God cares for everyone and calls on us to try to reach them. And our challenge is – in our changing world – we tend to do this less and less. With modern technology, it is ever so easy to just hang out with people who are like us. It is easy to move to places where our neighbors won’t be different but similar. It is even easy for Chrisitans to go to church only with other Christians who have the same basic beliefs and even like the same kind of music! We have more and more choices but we tend to want to hang out with people who are just like us rather than those who are different. A healthy society is one where we see the value in our neighbors, even, maybe epically, those who are different from us. Just to be blunt, our society needs people following Jesus’ teaching as never before. We need to be other there as peacemakers, reconcilers, and people who help build bridges between peoples – not help erect barriers in a spurious attempt to keep us safe.
Let us never let this teaching of Jesus be unspoken or misused. It needs to be a teaching that we bring more and more to heart and try to live out. We need to work on our own issues and try to see the image of God more and more in our neighbors. And we need to practice the amazing grace we receive from God. Let us be such a people. Let us live out the teachings of Jesus.
To God be the glory, forever and ever, amen.
Note: All images are easily available and meant strictly to illustrate. If anyone wishes any image to be removed, I am glad to do so. I am not a graphic designer and try to use very simple or classical imagery in the public domain.
What Draws Attention 