"Judging Not"
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 4th, 2001
Text: Matthew VII: 1 - 6
I need your help this morning: I would like to know what you think. As I was reading the newspaper this week, a number of things came to me and, I must admit, I didn't know how to respond. For example, there was a newspaper article earlier this week about the plight of the native community here in Canada. It was where Matthew Coon Come, the leader of the native community, told many of his leaders that they needed to sober up because of the problems that their community is facing. In the article, which gave an account of Coon Come's address, a number of facts appeared that I frankly did not know, or had not heard before: For example, aboriginal children are twenty-five times more likely to suffer fetal alcohol syndrome than the world average; that tuberculosis rates are more than ten times higher than the Canadian average; that about one in eight aboriginal communities is threatened by unsafe water that kills children and the elderly each year; that aboriginals over the age of fifteen are twice as likely to smoke; and that suicide rates in 1997 were more than three times the national average. Now I read that and I am upset. I am upset to think that our society allows this to happen. I am upset to think that many native leaders sometimes cast a blind eye to their own people's problems and that our governments very often do not act, or, when they do, act inefficiently. Yet, I read what it says in the King James Version of the Bible that I was taught as a young boy, at the beginning of Matthew Chapter VII: Judge not, that ye be not judged. I wonder what should I do.
I turn the page and there is another article. It is an article on entertainment, and on the television programme Temptation Island. Many of you will recall that, a few months ago, I had some unkind words to say about Survivor. Well, in this case, you can multiply by ten. In fact, I didn't even know the premise of the show until I read in the paper what it was. Listen to this, folks, the premise of Temptation Island is this: Three unmarried, but committed, couples go to an island in Belize. Boyfriends and girlfriends are separated for two weeks. During this period, the men go out on dates with numerous, gorgeous, single women. The girlfriends get to chase after hunky, single men. Tonight, we find out who cheated on whom. The writer says (and I agree): "It's sick." But then, the writer says: "I was hooked from the start." - (which I wasn't.) I realized when I read this, that one half of all the people who were watching television in Toronto that night, watched that programme. Now, I don't know about you but the world in which I live is rife with adultery and with fornication. We see it at the highest levels of government. We see it on the streets. We see it on every soap opera. Why we need a programme that is now setting out to tempt us all to go in that direction is beyond my imagination. I read this stuff and, frankly, I get upset. I do. I don't know where this thing ends. Yet, at the back of my mind, are the words of the King James Bible: Judge not, that ye be not judged.
Then on Friday, I got an E-mail from a young man that I haven't seen or heard of for some fifteen years. The two of us were participants in the South African Institute of International Affairs. I found out from my friend's E-mail that, over the last fifteen years, he has been working for human rights advocacy groups all over the world. He was finding me by surfing the 'Net and trying to contact all the friends that he could possibly find because he was so disturbed by what he had been seeing over the last couple of weeks that he didn't know what else to do except just tell everybody that he could possibly find. He had been in Indonesia and in the article that he sent me about what he'd seen he wrote the following: In the scramble to board the naval landing-craft, three thousand refugees paid scant attention to five headless corpses and a bloated torso that were bobbing against the ship's side. It says that they then found two other headless men who, apparently, had been killed twenty-four hours before because their bodies didn't smell; that on a Thursday night, with many of its houses empty and torched from the ten days of savagery, Sampit appeared peaceful ahead of Megawati's visit. Armed police patrolled the inner city and armed troops fanned out through the outskirts. Since the bloodletting began, more than four hundred people have died by the official count, mostly Mandarese immigrant settlers, at the hands of indigenous Dayak tribesmen. Hundreds more are feared dead in remote areas. The bodies floating down the rivers have not been counted. I cannot begin to tell you publicly the rest of his E-mail, except to say that he had seen children cut open live in the middle of fields and people beheaded, propped up against trees. He says: "I wonder where the outrage of the world is here. I want you to know, and to let people know, that this is going on." Now I don't know the complexities of the issue. I would be the last to judge. I do not know the politics of Indonesia and Borneo. Yet, I feel within me this revulsion about what is happening, and the silence of the world in the face of it. I want to judge this situation. Still in the back of my mind are those words from Sunday School Judge not, that ye be not judged.
I wonder at times whether or not the words of Jesus are, in fact, dangerous words. I hear many people use them, for example, to justify the suspension of critical evaluation: Those who live in a society that is relativistic, that often does not want to discuss the hard things, that believes in a sort of a moral acquiescence, find it quite comforting to repeat the words of Jesus when he said Judge not, that ye be not judged. Indeed, in many ways, those words, when they are repeated on the tongues of many, stifle debate: One no longer feels that one can make a judgement, or that one can stand in some sort of righteous indignation about what is going on. We just simply live and let live; for who are you, or who am I, or who are we, to judge anybody else, for that matter. But is that what Jesus was saying? Did Jesus want us to be, as Blum wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, just simply the sort of people who lie down and acquiesce to whatever is happening, just because we are told that we must not judge?
No, not at all. Indeed, the words of Jesus flow out of his very tradition as a Jew; flow out of the great passages of the Mishnah which say things such as this: "Do not judge your fellow until you have sat in his position. Then if you judge anyone by a measure, let that same measure be judging you." For indeed, if one looks at the history of the people of Israel, while there is this call to be careful, while there is this need to make sure that we do not judge by a measure other than that by which we are judged, still, nevertheless, there is a profound sense of judgement within the Old Testament. From the prophets who said: "Thus saith the Lord …" in condemning injustice and immorality, to the Law, the very Torah itself, that sets out the way that human beings should live with each other as social creatures, even to the very words of the psalmist himself, who understood that there is also a time for judgement. You can see, indeed, throughout it all, there is this sense in which the law of God is in fact a judgement upon us all. And we in our traditions have followed this through.
Just recently, I was reading John Locke's two treatises on Government. I realized that he himself, in his understanding of the role of government, was informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition when he said that our legislative powers have, in fact, the right to set laws whereby we are judged; that as social creatures, as creatures who live with one another, there is a place for judgement. But Jesus' concern was not that there is to be no judgement, but that we must be cautious and careful when we judge. For example, he is talking about ill-mannered judgements. He is talking about judgements made from the position of being morally superior. He is talking about judging when we only know half the truth, rather than the whole truth. He is saying that on any basis on which you decide to judge someone else, you yourself will also be judged. If you look at the life of Jesus himself, there were many times when he passed judgement. He passed judgement on the money changers and threw them out of the temple. He passed judgement even on the woman who had been caught in adultery. He told those who were stoning her to go away; but told the woman to sin no more. Indeed, throughout his parables, the message of the Kingdom is a message of judgement. It is the separating of wheat from chaff. It is the separating of sheep from goats. There is a word of judgement that runs throughout the message of Jesus of Nazareth: Jesus is not simply saying that there is no place for judgement, but that in judgement there must be great caution.
There are four reasons why I think we should all be very, very cautious about our judgement. The first of these is ourselves: Any measure that we mete out to another will also be meted out to us, to ourselves.
There was a wonderful tradition in medieval times which was known as the running of the quintain. For the running of the quintain, there was a pole on top of which, at a right angle, there was a particular thing that the jousters on their horses were supposed to hit. When they hit it, however, swinging around on the back end, was a bag of corn. The idea was to hit the first target, but to make sure, through being dexterous, that you didn't get hit by the bag of corn as it swung around. Of course, all the great ones learned that the softer you hit the target, the slower the bag of corn came round. The problem was, most of the jousters, trying to show their vigour and vitality, hit the target hard. Of course, the bag of corn swung around and hit them faster as well. The same measure that you mete out is actually brought back to you as well.
There is a wonderful story of the time of Frederick II. In 1772, when Poland was partitioned, Maria Theresa, who was the Archduchess of Austria, was one of the people signing the partition. She began to weep when she did this and said: "Oh, it is so sad that we have to partition Poland. It is only on the advice of my leaders that I am doing this. What we do today will be judged an iniquity." - or something like that. Frederick II said of her once: "She weeps much but she keeps on annexing."
There are many times, my friends, when we weep much but we keep on annexing. We keep doing the hypocritical thing. We judge other people by a measure by which we ourselves are not prepared to be judged. That is why Jesus, in the gospels, goes to such lengths to try to get people actually to analyze their hearts and to understand themselves. It is why he says, for example, even if we look with lust in our eyes, we have committed adultery; even when we have, in our attitude of mind, in our motivation, done something wrong, it is the same, as doing the very thing itself. We must be careful if we measure people by a certain standard when we ourselves are titillated by the very same things. But there is something more: Not only must we be careful of ourselves, we must also be careful of our ignorance.
Last night, I was watching the hockey game between Ottawa and Toronto. My heart was broken at the final score. I must admit that, as many of you know, I have become a turncoat and now love the Maple Leafs, but there was another time. I was there in the early days of the Ottawa Senators and they were dark days. I remember sitting at a particular game, one of the first ones at the Corel Centre. They had just hired a new player, called Radik Bonk. Radik Bonk was supposed to be the saviour of the team. I'll never forget the night that I was there with a friend of mine. We were sitting in the front row, right next to the glass, and Bonk had an atrocious game. Every time he went into a corner to get the puck, the other player got it. Every time he was about to score a goal, he missed. Every time he made a check, he missed and hit the boards. Every time he tried to do anything, it was a complete failure. It looked to me as if this lazy Czech was simply skating around the centre of the ice and not doing anything. So, along with all the other indignant Ottawa fans, I began to hammer the plastic. I and my friend got quite animated and actually said some very rude things to Mr. Bonk (for which I apologize). I kept saying: "Oh, come on, get on with it" etc. Everyone was booing him every time he came on the ice. The next morning, I woke up and read the newspaper to find that Radik Bonk had been playing that game with two broken bones in his foot. What a wake-up call. I had been judging but I did not know the full story.
Or I think back to a time, and I have shared this with a Bible Study group, when a friend of mine and I were standing on a high street in a place called Uitenhage, in South Africa. I remember it as if it were yesterday. In the middle of our conversation about the events of the day, all of a sudden this gentleman, who was clearly a kozaar, a black man, walked right between the two of us. Well, you can imagine that this was the rudest thing that we had ever seen in our lives. We actually made a couple of comments to this man, such as How about a few niceties along the way? or something like that. As we recounted this story to friends of ours the following day, we were told that, in fact, that man was paying us the greatest sign of respect imaginable: In the kozaar tradition, if you walk behind someone's back, it is a sign of disrespect because he does not see the sword that is in your hand. Therefore, they always ensure that they walk in front of people, rather than behind them. How humbled I was to realize that this man was actually being respectful, but by my standards, he was being rude.
My friends, we do that all the time. We do not know the full truth of people's lives. We are ignorant of the full picture. We simply do not know. We cannot understand why some people react, when they have come from an abusive home. We cannot appreciate the abuse of alcohol, when there are people who have come from an alcoholic background. We cannot understand the lack of sanity, when there are people who have come from an insane home. We cannot understand people who are dirty, who have been living in unclean places, if we do not know the conditions in which they live. On, and on, and on it goes. The fact of the matter is: There is so much that we do not know. This is what Jesus was getting at, because the ordinary people, the poor people, were being judged by the religious leaders of their day. Yet, the religious leaders of their day had privileges that many of them did not have. They stood in judgement on the people of the land, and the people of the land could not stand up to that kind of scrutiny.
This brings me to the third thing: The third thing is our own sense of unworthiness. There is a wonderful line in Jesus' phrase. He said: "Do not judge someone for the speck that he has in his eye when you have a log in your own. Deal with the log first and then you might be qualified to deal with the speck."
There is a wonderful story about a great barrister, who was known for being very witty. His name was E.F. Smith and he used to appear at the Old Bailey. One day, he realized he was going to appear before a judge for whom he didn't have a great deal of time, and whose excesses he knew very well. And so, in the middle of a moment of cross examination with a particularly difficult witness, he said to the witness: "Is it not true that, on the night in question, you were, in fact, as drunk as a judge?" The judge leaned over and said to him: "Mr. Smith, I am afraid you have the phrase wrong: It's as sober as a judge but as drunk as a lord." He paused, and said: "Yes, M'Lord, you are correct."
Sometimes, my friends, we stand in judgement over others and we have no qualifications to do so within our own heart and soul. There is a wonderful line - I saw it on the back of a magazine. I don't know who wrote it, but it said the following: A fox should not sit on the jury at a goose's trial. That is why, in the Greek tradition, the accused very often would have a bag placed over his head before he or she stood before a jury, in order that the jury not be influenced by the look on the face of the accused. There is a sense in which, if they were to do so, they might find themselves morally superior and therefore judge incorrectly.
We must always therefore, and Lent is the time, examine our own hearts and our own lack of worthiness. The Apostle Paul put it so simply in the Book of Romans: For all have sinned without exception, and all have fallen short of the Glory of God in Jesus Christ. There is not one of us, no matter how pious or moral, who has not got within him the very seed of sin. So we must be careful.
This brings me to the final reason that we must not judge: that is, that The Judge, the supreme judge, is Jesus, and not ourselves. Throughout his ministry, Jesus went to great lengths to say that. Although he cast aspersions on certain things, and pointed out the errors and sins of others, he said that the principal reason that he came to earth was not to condemn, but to save. "I have come to seek and to save" he said, "that which is lost." The very purpose of his ministry was one of salvation. It was a rescue mission. It was a desire to take those who had sinned and bring them into the Kingdom of God by virtue of his very own sacrifice and by his love. And he went to great lengths to demonstrate this. The Bible also makes it abundantly clear that, following his resurrection and ascension, Jesus is now the ultimate judge of humanity; that, as the Creed says, Jesus sits at the right hand of God the Father, from whence he shall judge the living and the dead; that the true and the right and the pure and the honest judge is Jesus of Nazareth.
Now, if you think back to the passage of the Mishnah that I quoted at the very beginning, this lends credence and credibility to the judgement of Jesus, for it says: Do not judge your fellow until you have sat in his position. The heart of the gospel of the incarnation is that Jesus of Nazareth has sat in our position. As John rightly said this morning, in the words of Assurance of Pardon, Jesus was fully tempted; Jesus was fully human. He understood human sin. He understood the wiles of evil. He understood temptation. Because of that, as a risen Christ therefore, he now judges us with equity and with truth because he has shared our burdens and knows and understands our weaknesses and our plight. The real judge, therefore, is never ultimately we, but Christ. Whenever we pass judgement on anyone else, as at times we must do, we must also do so in the knowledge that it is Christ who, ultimately and fairly, will be judging us by the same standard that we use. Which brings me back then to the very beginning.
What are we to do, when we face the immorality that we find in Temptation Island? Do we judge? Yes we do. When we face the inequities in our society, and the injustices that we find in our land, are we to speak out in judgement? Yes, we must. When we see what is happening in Borneo, may we have an outrage that is predicated on the love of God? Absolutely, but always with the proviso that we will be measured by the same judgement that we ourselves mete out; always on the understanding that any judgement that we offer in this world, either corporately or individually, we offer under the rubric of the sovereignty of the risen Christ, Jesus Christ our Lord; and that when we judge, we must always judge by that basis by which we ourselves have been forgiven: namely, the love of God.
I read a poem once. I know not its source, but these words struck me. It talks about the end of life and the fact that then we will see what now we see only partially. The final stanza goes as follows:
There the tears of earth are dried, There its hidden things are clear, There the work of life is tried, By a juster judge than here. May we never forget that. Judge not that ye be not judged. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.