Hilton Head Island, SC – July 10, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 7:6-14; Matthew 7:1-5
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” – Matthew 7:1-2 (RSV)
What the Church has called “The Sermon on the Mount” is an example of what the ancient rabbis called pilpul. The Hebrew word pilpul means “stringing beads.” It is like stringing different-colored beads onto a necklace or a fancy bracelet or some such thing. Individually each bead may not mean much, but in totality they produce the vision of something beautiful.
Rabbinic writings were like legal arguments among attorneys. You put together various theological thoughts or concepts to “make your case.” Making cases is what the rabbis did, and that’s what Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount. Each segment of a few verses may or may not be related to the previous and the following segments, but together, they make a powerful theological statement about how we are supposed to live. Thus Jesus went from one topic to another, and each topic might or might not be directly connected to the last. Nevertheless all of it was intended to be connected to how we, as individuals, are to live our lives as sons and daughters of God in the kingdom of God. These sayings are a manual for Christian conduct.
The subject for our consideration today is the matter of judging others. And the first question we need to address is this: When we judge people, do we judge their behavior, or do we judge them as persons? When we judge behavior, we are making assessments of their actions, and that may be not only justified, but necessary. In a classroom of young children, the teacher must make judgments on how each child is learning the material, and also how they are treating the other children. If there is misbehavior, the teacher must correct bad actions, but must never treat the student as a bad person. Those who are made to believe they are bad may subconsciously reflect that belief by continuously engaging in bad behavior. They feel obligated to live up to their reputations. Young men who take AR-15s and kill or injure lots of people are like that.
Good behavior comes naturally to some people, and for the most part they do what they are expected to do. But for other people righteousness seems to be as difficult for them as it would be for a person who is five feet tall to win the world’s record in the broad jump or to score 56 points in a basketball game. Robert Burns wrote a poem about people who sanctimoniously judge other people harshly. Perhaps he did that because his behavior was often quite questionable, and therefore many people thought ill of him. God alone is able rightfully to judge anyone, Burns said, for only He knows the complete story on anyone. “Who made the heart, ‘tis He alone/ Decidedly can try us;/ He knows each chord, its various tone,/ Each spring, its various bias;/ Then at the balance let’s be mute,/ We never can adjust it;/ What’s done we partly may compute,/ But know not what’s resisted.” (Address to the Unco Guid)
Robert Burns was about five feet tall, and for that reason he may have acted out some feelings of inferiority by behavior he knew would attract attention, even if was the wrong kind of behavior. What runs through the minds of young men who take assault rifles into schools or grocery stores or shoot spectators at a Fourth of July parade? Their actions are despicable, but are they therefore also despicable? Their wanton murder is evil, but are they also evil? Do they cease being children of God when they engage in such irrational actions? How can we not judge such people?
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” When Jesus said that, was he thinking about criminals or pedophiles or those whose behavior is fundamentally pathological? Or was he merely thinking about gossips or petty thieves, or perhaps about the particular scribes and Pharisees who judged him to be a heretic? Might Jesus have been preaching to himself as well as to everyone listening to him?
We are living at a time when political polarization has the American people more divided than at any time before. Neither side seems capable of trying to understand where the other side is coming from. We paint those on the other side of the spectrum with a very broad brush, assuming that they are all dunderheads, while we, in our greatly enlightened manner, are exemplars of reason and moderation. And if you don’t think like that about your political adversaries, I will admit that often I think like that.
Where does it get us? Do such opinions draw us closer together, or do they drive us farther apart? The answer to that is painfully obvious. Having become so polarized, do we even try to understand why the people on the other side think the way they do? Do the people from our two quite different political tribes become ever more tribal in their thinking and in their actions as our malaise continues? And do those judgments make things better, or worse?
People who use politically correct language tend to be judged severely by those who choose not to speak with political correctness. The reverse is also true; those who deliberately use hurtful slang words to describe others may do so intentionally, and it angers the politically correct, who judge the users of pejorative words to be insensitive antisocial brutes.
Native Americans (a politically correct term) had a saying which relates to the section of the Sermon of the Mount which is our focus for today. “Don’t judge a man,” they said, “until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.” It suggests that before we speak ill of someone, or of the behavior of someone, we should try to perceive things in the way that person perceives them. If they were abused by their parents, or if they were born with a condition which rendered them disabled for the rest of their lives, or if their whole family died in a terrible accident and they alone survived, would they see things the way we see things, if our lives have been relative happy and carefree? Does a person’s particular life experience positively or negatively affect how they live out their lives? Is there an explanation for why Proud Boys are Proud Boys --- not a rationale, but an explanation?
In his novel Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh wrote, “To understand all is to forgive all.” Is that true? And if it is true, is there anyone, other than God, who has the capability to understand all and therefore to forgive all? Is Jesus suggesting that only God can fairly judge anyone’s life or behavior in its entirety, for only God knows everyone’s complete story? Even we ourselves do not understand ourselves completely, for we misinterpret things that happen to us or around us, and thus we misinterpret why we do what we do.
Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a heavily sardonic poem about a man whom everyone admired, but who apparently bore burdens about which none of them had any knowledge. The poem is called Richard Cory.
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from soul to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace;
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
We can never fully comprehend what life is like for another person. Those we most admire may carry burdens we could never imagine, and those we least admire may have factors in their existence which would explain their aberrant behavior, except that, as with Richard Cory, we may never know why they do what they do.
Some people seem to be born angelic, and live as angels for their entire lives, whatever it is that angels are supposed to do. Others appear to be born mean and ornery, and they stay mean and ornery forever. Many people are paragons of moderation for sixty or seventy years, but when they get older, they become increasingly irascible. Is it because in old age they don’t feel well, and therefore they behave badly, or is it that they lose their internal governor, that unseen mechanism within that kept their negative impulses in check - - - or is it something else? Who knows, other than God? Who can know, other than God? “To understand all is to forgive all.”
Is Jesus encouraging us to do something which may be impossible, or is he just urging us to do better than we are naturally inclined to do?
Aristotle said, “Man is by nature a social animal.” That being the case, every person is thrown into a world filled with other people. As such, in order to live in human society, inevitably we learn to make judgments about other people. Are they bright, or not so bright, are they good, or not so good, are they pleasant to be with, or are they burrs under our saddles or flies in our ointment? It may be neither wise nor safe not to judge others, but on what basis do we judge them? Is the purpose of our judgment better to understand them, or is it to find fault with them and to castigate them? Do we feel better when we have passed judgment on someone, either to their face or in the privacy of our own thoughts, or do we feel worse, having fallen victim to the twisted thought that we need to judge them at all?
If we judge anyone to have engaged in sin, or at least in behavior that is socially and morally unacceptable, we are likely to think them to be bad people. In these five brief verses from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to be telling us that if we judge others to be bad, it will be bad for us. From then on we will treat them differently than we did before we passed a negative judgment on them, and it will have negative reverberations in our own lives. “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? …You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck that is in your brother’s eye” (Mt. 7:3,5).
People who are adversely critical of others may become adversely critical themselves. Because they so clearly perceive the faults of others, they may unwitt ingly exhibit those faults in their own behavior. It is the last thing they would intend to do, but subconsciously they may be criticizing in others those traits in themselves they are the least likely to perceive or even to understand.
Last Tuesday evening I watched a thirty-year-old movie I had never heard of or seen before. It was called Defending Your Life, and it starred Albert Brooks, the comedian, and Meryl Streep, whom I consider the finest film actress of our time. The plot was clever, if fanciful. It was about all the recent arrivals in what presumably is heaven, except that most of the people are quite old, and there are no children or young adults in this cinematic depiction at all. Albert Brooks is an advertising executive who got killed when he ran head-on into a bus while reaching down in his brand-new BMW convertible to retrieve some papers which had fallen off the front seat. Meryl Streep is a thirty-something woman who drank too much, tripped over a chaise lounge by a swimming pool, hit her head and knocked herself out, and drowned in the swimming pool.
Everybody in this version of a heaven-like place of judgment is tried in a celestial court of law before two human judges. Each of the newly dead has a defense attorney, but there is also a prosecutor who tries to find the individual guilty. If they are innocent they get to stay in heaven, and if they guilty they have to go back to earth live another (presumably human) life as somebody else. It was a little too reincarnational for me, but still, it was a thought-provoking plot.
Jaundiced judgments can come back to haunt us. We are to deduce that Albert must return to earth but Meryl can graduate to Real Heaven. The things which most put us off about other people may be the things we most dislike about ourselves, but we repress an awareness of our own bad traits by focusing on the bad traits of those around us. Jaundiced judgments can consciously haunt us only if we acknowledge them to be jaundiced. If we think they are correct, we may falsely convince ourselves that we are right and that others are wrong.
Referring to this matter, in his letter to the Romans Paul wrote, supposedly quoting scripture, “None is righteous, no. not one, no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have gone wrong; no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:11,12). In truth, there is nothing in the Hebrew Bible that exactly says that. Paul was paraphrasing what he remembered it said, fitting into those words his own thoughts, namely, that we all do wrong (which is right) and that no one is righteous (which is arguably and even demonstrably wrong).
So what, in the end, may we conclude about what Jesus said about judging others? First, it is advisable not to do it at all, at least in an imperious or punitive manner. If people do what we know they shouldn’t do, we should just gently remind them to knock it off. Don’t scold them or call them names or belittle them for what they have done. As the famous preacher said in his famous benediction (and I have never been able to verify the preacher’s name, but I can remember the famous benediction): “Be kind, be kind; everyone is fighting a hard battle.” If you feel you must judge someone for bad behavior, be gentle. But try not to judge at all, If you feel you must, then God must also judge you, and that you might not like.