Planks And Specks

DO NOT JUDGE, AND YOU WILL NOT BE JUDGED

As we travel through the gospel of Luke together, I wanted to backtrack this week to revisit the heart of Jesus’ teaching in ch. 6. This passage is one most of us have heard before. And as clear cut as it may seem, I found I really struggled this week with how to expound on what Jesus is really trying to tell us here. This is one of those passages that I almost wish a pastor could just stand up and say, “Alright, now go do it!” But things are rarely that simple. Not because God makes things complicated. God, in his infinite grace and unfathomable depth of love has made it so that the Gospel message is the easiest thing in the world to grasp and follow. And yet, a person can spend their entire life studying it and never fully plumb its depths. No, we are to blame for overly complicating it. If there is one thing about human ingenuity and human sinfulness, it’s that we are adept at applying both to misunderstand and misconstrue the simplest of Christ’s commands designed to teach us to be unselfish, and turn it into an essentially selfish precept.

This is exactly what our culture has done with the precept, “Do not judge.” We tend to apply it to mean we should not attempt to discern the morality of the actions of others, with the implication that we are being hypocrites for doing so. The problem is, everyone judges! On a very basic level, it’s part of our natural instinct to discern potential threats in our environment. When someone approaches you on the street, whether you fully realize it or not, your brain is already beginning to register their gait, what their eyes are focusing on, where their attention lies, all of that. That is because someone approaching you with the intent to harm you or rob you, is going to give off very different signals than someone simply out for an evening stroll.

We do it when we choose our doctors. We want to know they are trustworthy and knowledgeable and will come to the right diagnosis and treatment. If a doctor has had a slew of malpractice suits levied against them and has a suspended license, do we want them in charge of our cancer treatment? Of course not! Now, imagine you told such a doctor that you’ve decided to see a different one because of his conduct, and he retorted with, “Don’t judge me, man!” That would be ridiculous, right?

And yet, we (as a culture) do that very thing anytime someone challenges any aspect of our way of life, but maybe most especially in the arena of morality. Take the issue of abortion, for example. Culturally, it is a hot button issue, but unfortunately this may be less true now than it was in the past. For those of us who are pro-life, and yes, anti-abortion; we perceive a moral mandate to preserve the beauty of life expressed in the unborn and we affirm that fetuses are just as valuable, just as much alive, and just as much loved by God for being who they are, as the wonderful mothers who bear them. Yet the first reply we often get when we stand up for the rights of the unborn and assert that we shouldn’t kill them, is that we “shouldn’t judge others” for the decisions they make regarding their own bodies.

DISCERNMENT VS. CONDEMNATION

And this is the problem with our culture’s appropriation of Jesus’ teaching. It is almost as if people are saying we have no right to discern right from wrong in the public sphere, or in other people’s lives! But that is not what Jesus is talking about at all. In fact, Jesus makes it clear just how essential discernment of right and wrong, and specifically of other people’s motives, is to the Christian walk when in Mat. 10:16 he says, “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”(1)

Discernment is essential to our faith, so that we are not deceived by every eloquent teacher who comes our way or every new philosophy and system of morality which appeals to our culture. Instead, what Jesus is talking about here is made clear in the second part of this verse, “condemn not, and you will not be condemned.” By using a common Hebrew rhetorical device, Jesus frames his saying in a parallel structure, where the first part is essentially equivalent to the second part. This happens over and over again in Hebrew scripture, especially in the Psalms and Proverbs, but also peppered throughout the rest of the Old Testament. A great example is Ps. 24:1-2, “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, and the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.”