Don’t Judge People-Matthew 7

Don’t Judge People (powerpoint)

Everybody judges others. Sadly, Christians judge others too. We even judge Christians–our brothers and sisters in Christ–for being unthankful, ungrateful, childish, immature, uncommitted, disloyal, lazy, irresponsible, not serving enough, not sacrificing enough, not doing enough, and when you do you’re judged for doing it badly or wrongly or poorly. Thus Jesus says explicitly, “Do not judge others” (Mt 7:1). Christians disobey God when we judge others based on our own expectations.

Do not judge. Those formed to live trusting in God’s abundance (Mt 6:33) will not find it odd that Jesus tells us not to judge (Mt 7:1). Yet no teaching of Jesus seems more paradoxical than his prohibition against judging. Any attempt to avoid judging is defeated by the judgment against those who judge. Also, Jesus does judge, particularly the scribes and the Pharisees who “sit on Moses’ seat” (Mt 23:2). The paradoxical character of Jesus’s admonition against judging is the result of our attempt to separate Jesus’ teaching from the teacher and the community he has come to establish.

Not God but a creature. To become a disciple of Jesus is to learn to see and accept the world as God’s world. We are not called to be God, but rather we are called to learn to be a creature of God. Should we criticize birds for not sowing or reaping (Mt 6:26)? Should we think lilies are any less than what God created them to be because “they neither toil nor spin” (Mt 6:28)? As God’s good creation, our task is to learn, as the birds and the lilies do, that we are God’s good creation.

Visible and hidden. There is a connection between the first two chapters of the Sermon on the Mount and the climatic admonitions that conclude the sermon in Mt 7. Per Bonhoeffer, Mt 5 describes the extraordinary character of being a disciple of Jesus; it is nothing less than becoming a visible alternative to the world (Mt 5:16). Mt 6 displays the simple and hidden character of the life to which the disciples are called (Mt 6:1-3). Both chapters help us see that to be a disciple of Jesus requires separation from the community to which we had belonged, for we now belong to Jesus. The boundary between those who would follow Jesus and the world is apparent, but permeable. Matthew 7 consists of Jesus’s instructions for how to negotiate that permeability.

Christians/disciples have no special rights. Do the disciples who are called and set apart from the crowd mean they have special rights? Does it mean that the disciples have special powers, standards, or talents that give them authority over those who have not received these gifts? This might be so, if Jesus’ disciples assumed that they were to separate themselves from the world by sharp and divisive judgments. If they had done so, Bonhoeffer notes, “people could have come to think that it was Jesus’ will that such divisive and condemnatory judgments were to be made in the disciples’ daily dealings with others. Thus Jesus must make clear that such misunderstandings seriously endanger discipleship. Disciples are not to judge. If they do judge, then they themselves fall under God’s judgment. They themselves will perish by the sword with which they judge others. The gap which divides them from others, as the just from the unjust, even divides them from Jesus.” Why is this so?

Disciples live completely out of the bond connecting them with Christ. Their righteousness depends only on that bond and never apart from it. Therefore, it can never become a standard which the disciples would own and might use in any way they please. What makes them disciples is not a new standard for their lives, but Jesus Christ alone, the mediator and Son of God himself. (Bonhoeffer 2001, 169–70)

We can’t see our own eye. The disciples are not to judge because any judgment that needs to be made has been made. For those who follow Jesus to act as if they can, on their own, determine what is good and what is evil is to betray the work of Christ. Therefore, the appropriate stance for the acknowledgement of evil is the confession of sin. We cannot see clearly unless we have been trained to see “the log that is in [our] eye” (Mt 7:3). It is not possible for us to see what is in our eye because the eye cannot see itself. That is why we are able to see ourselves only through the vision made possible by Jesus—a vision made possible by our participation in a community of forgiveness that allows us to name our sins.

Judging blinds us because, as Bonhoeffer puts it, “when I judge, I am blind to my own evil and to the grace granted the other person. But in the love of Christ, disciples know about every imaginable kind of guilt and sin, because they know of the suffering of Jesus Christ” (2001, 172). Following Christ requires our recognizing that the one I am tempted to judge is like me—a person who has received the forgiveness manifest in the cross. The recognition that the other person is like me—in need of forgiveness—prevents those who would follow Jesus from trying to force others to follow Jesus. We must, like Jesus, have the patience necessary to let those called deny that call. It means that the disciples are not called to make the world conform to the gospel, but rather the disciples are schooled to be patient, to be nonviolent—which means that the gospel is not a “conquering idea” that neither knows nor respects resistance. Rather, “the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people. For the Word, there are such things as hardened hearts and locked doors. The Word accepts the resistance it encounters and bears it” (Bonhoeffer 2001, 173).

Don‘t force others. Not to judge is to be schooled by the humility of the Son. That schooling begins through learning to confess our unwillingness to live as creatures that have been given all we need to be at peace with ourselves and one another. It does no good to force on others what we have been given. Jesus tells us we are not to give what is holy to those who have no capacity to receive what they are being given (Mt 7:6). Jesus does not deny that there will be those who are too afraid to receive the life he has come to offer. This fear is precisely why he has come into the world—that the world may know it is the world.

The central affirmation of the NT is that Christ was sent to exercise dominion over the world (John Howard Yoder). Before Jesus’s ministry, our existence was dominated by powers and principalities that had revolted against their creator, but through Jesus’s ministry the powers and principalities have been again restored to service in God’s kingdom (1 Cor. 15). That Jesus has been victorious means that the time of the church, the time constituted by those called by Jesus into his kingdom of forgiveness, is characterized by the coexistence of two ages or what the New Testament calls eons (1964, 9).

Two ages coexist but represent different directions: “The present aeon is characterized by sin and centered on man; the coming aeon is the redemptive reality which entered history in an ultimate way in Christ. The present age, by rejecting obedience, has rejected the only possible ground for man’s own well being; the coming age is characterized by God’s will being done” (1964, 9). The new age has yet to reach consummation, but it has clearly already begun to supersede the old. Jesus’s admonition to his disciples not to judge, his charge to not give what is holy to those who will not receive what they are given, presupposes that the kingdom has come.

Disciples acknowledge their sins while the world does not. Following Jesus creates a division between church and world. Christians believe that all people can live the way Jesus would have us live. The world is merely the name for those who have chosen to use this time of God’s patience to not live the way that Jesus has given us in TSOM. The only advantage the disciples have is that they are able to acknowledge their sinfulness, and in that acknowledgment they are able to embody, through community, the life of forgiveness.

Learn to live on the basis of gift. Jesus tells his disciples not to give what is holy, what is of great value, to those who will only profane what they have been given (Mt 7:6), for the kingdom Jesus begun can be rejected. Instead, those capable of receiving the kingdom are those able to ask and receive (Mt 7:7a). Just as Jesus needed to teach us to pray (Mt 6:9), so he must teach us to ask that the door be opened (Mt 7:7b). We can do so with the full confidence that the door will be opened (Mt 7:8). Even those who are evil know how to give appropriate gifts to their children (Mt 7:9-11a). Therefore it is surely the case that those who follow Jesus can ask the Father to give the good things that only he can give (Mt 7:11b). The trick is to learn how to live on the basis of gift. We fear receiving, requiring as it does the acknowledgment of our dependence and our need for forgiveness.

Learn to live by receiving. To be forgiven, to ask for forgiveness (Mt 6:12), forges a space, making possible a community that has learned to live by receiving. The life Jesus calls us through TSOM is a life of renewed communion with God. The Father has refused to let our refusal determine our relationship with him. We are, therefore, being trained to ask through the sermon that Jesus delivers, and the asking is part of the way of life that makes it possible for us to be befriended by God and one another. Sacrifice may well be part of what such a life entails, but sacrifice is in service of the gift of mutuality otherwise unattainable.

The Golden Rule (Mt 7:12a) is an expression of the mutuality discovered through forgiveness. But when the rule is isolated from the eschatological context of the sermon, and/or is abstracted from Jesus’s ministry in order to ground ethics, it is made to serve a completely different narrative than the one called the kingdom of God. That we are to do to others as we would have others do to us is not ethics. According to Jesus it is the summation of the law and the prophets (Mt 7:12b). Kant sought to free ethics from historical particularity. Jesus calls us to live faithful to the particularity of Israel’s law and prophets. Jesus does not say that now that we know the Golden Rule—and the rule was known prior to Jesus—we no longer need to know the law and the prophets. On the contrary, we must know the law and the prophets if we are to know how to act toward others. Let us not forget that this is the same Jesus who told us earlier in TSOM that he has not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them (Mt 5:17).

Love is the fulfillment of the law. But this is not a sentimental love, rather this love is a radical politics that challenges the world’s misappropriation of God’s good gift. Christ’s being the embodiment of God’s love means that disciples cannot know love apart from loving one’s enemies, for that is precisely what God has done regarding us: we are God’s enemies (Rom 5:10) yet God would still love us—even coming to die for us. We are, therefore, not surprised when, tested by the lawyer concerning which is the greatest commandment, Jesus’s answer is twofold: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Mt 22:37–40).

To know how to love our neighbor we must love God as God has loved us. This is the presumption of the law and the prophets. Jesus makes explicit what is implicit in the statement of the Golden Rule in the sermon, namely, that love of neighbor and love of God are interdependent. The law and the prophets are now to be seen in the ministry of Jesus, where God’s love for us is most intensely present. And yet we fear such intensity. We fear the intimacy of God’s love, desiring instead to believe that we are separated from God by vast space. But in Christ, God has drawn near to us and to our neighbor. As a result we discover that we do not have a long journey to undertake to get to God; rather the long journey is the rigorous path necessary to accept our own, and our neighbor’s, reality (Williams 2002, 35).

The narrow road called discipleship. Jesus does not try to entice us by telling us that it will be easy or that many will join us along the way. The gate is narrow and the road is hard (Mt 7:13-14). Moreover, the journey is made even more difficult by false prophets who are quite good at disguising themselves as fellow travelers (Mt 7:15). Bonhoeffer bluntly tells us: “To give witness to and to confess the truth of Jesus, but to love the enemy of this truth, who is his enemy and our enemy, with the unconditional love of Jesus Christ—that is the narrow road. To believe in Jesus’ promise that those who follow shall possess the earth, but to encounter the enemy unarmed, to prefer suffering injustice to doing ill—that is the narrow road. To perceive other people as being weak and wrong, but to never judge them; to proclaim the good news to them, but never to throw pearls before swine—that is a narrow road. It is an unbearable road.” (Bonhoeffer 2001, 176)

We are only able to walk such a road because we can see Jesus walking ahead of us and with us. If, however, we begin to consider the threats along the road, if we fear losing our way and keep our eyes to the ground rather than on Jesus, we can be sure we will lose our way. We must keep our eyes on him because he is the gate and the way. How could we expect anything different, given that Jesus calls for us to abandon the world for the kingdom of God? Surely, Bonhoeffer rhetorically asks, we could not have expected a wide road to run between the kingdom of heaven and the world.

Jesus clearly does not expect that many will follow him on the road he must walk. He has already suggested that some who follow him will do so falsely and they will not be easily identified. They may even, for a time, fool themselves. Jesus suggests to his disciples that the only way to discover those who are false is to judge them by their fruit (Mt 7:16). If we know ourselves and others by our fruits, we must learn what good fruit is. Jesus’ sermon provides the outline for the discernment of true Christians.

No separation from belief and how we live. Jesus’ recommendation for discernment has important implications for what it means to believe that what we believe as Christians is true. In recent times, Christians have found themselves unable to explain to themselves or their neighbors why they believe what they believe to be true. Too often these attempts to establish the truth of what we believe try to separate the truth of our beliefs from how we live. But if we are to follow Jesus that is exactly what we cannot do.

Known by how we live, not what we believe. Separating the truth of what we believe from our lives comes from our fear of being held accountable. The idea that we can separate what we believe from how we live is deeply rooted in cultural Christianity. “True” is what everyone believes, which means it is assumed that the coercive character of Constantinian Christianity is assumed to be justified because what Christians believe is what anyone believes on reflection. But Jesus claims that by our fruits we will be known (Mt 7:20), making impossible any attempt to separate the content of the Christian belief from how we must live. To believe that this man Jesus is the Christ requires that we become his disciples. Christology and discipleship are mutually implicated. Thus, the truth of Christian belief can never be abstracted from how we live.

It is not enough to call him Lord (Mt 7:21a), it is not enough to prophecy in his name, it is not enough to do deeds of power in his name, but rather only those who do the will of the Father will enter the kingdom of the Son (Mt 7:21b). This means that during this time between the times we will need to be patient, often unable to identify the false prophets from the true. But Jesus has not left us without resources. We know that the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for righteousness sake—all are signs of what it means to live truthfully (Mt 5:3-12).

The gospel cannot be known without witnesses. Moreover, a community constituted by such people has no reason to fear the truth, nor would such a community need constant reassurance that what they believe is true. If they live confidently and joyfully, the truth will be seen for what it is—a witness to the one alone who is the truth—for the truth of the gospel cannot be known without witnesses because it is not a truth separable from lives lived according to Jesus’ life. Jesus alone is the one who can be the truth because he shares his life with the Father.

There is no other way to the truth than the call to follow Jesus. Those who hear his words and act on them have lives founded on the only foundation capable of weathering the world (Mt 7:24). Jesus does not promise that those who follow him, those who become his people, will not experience difficulty. The exact opposite is the case. He tells us that we will be persecuted for his sake (Mt 6:11). Those who follow him will be exposed to dangers that those who are not his disciples can avoid, for his disciples offer the world an alternative to the violence of the world based on the lies thought necessary for people to survive in a world governed by mistrust. In such a world, a people of truth cannot help but be in danger because the world does not want its lies exposed.

Those who hear Jesus’ call to follow him can do nothing else even if their response exposes them to danger. But they may take comfort in knowing that they are not alone, because Jesus calls them to be part of a people who have learned to need one another. Jesus does not call them to be heroes. He calls them to be disciples who have learned by living lives described in TSOM that to so live makes them dependent on God and one another. It should not be surprising, therefore, that such a people have lives capable of surviving good and bad fortune.

TSOM is Jesus’ life. The crowds listening to Jesus’ sermon were astonished because he has taught, unlike the scribes, as one having authority (Mt 7:28-29). Scribes exercise authority by citing another authority. In contrast, Jesus teaches as one who has the authority to determine what is authoritative (Mt 28:18). What he says cannot be separated from who he is and how he says what he says. Jesus’ life is but a commentary on the sermon, and the sermon is the exemplification of his life. What he teaches is not different from what or who he is. Is it any wonder that the crowds are astonished at his teachings?

Jesus does not want our admiration…only our lives. Astonishment is not the response Jesus would want from those who hear him. What he has taught, what he is, requires nothing else than our lives. We cannot serve two masters (Mt 6:24). Like the Athenians who heard Paul preach, we’d like to respond to Jesus by saying, “We will hear you again about this” (Acts 17:32). But Jesus refuses to let us determine our relation to him. He teaches as one having authority. That authority asks us to be willing to lose our lives for his sake (Mt 16:25). Only the Son of God has the authority to ask for our lives, and that is the authority behind every word of the Sermon on the Mount.

Reference:

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.
2. Hauerwas, Stanley. Cross-Shattered Christ. Meditations on the Seven Last Words. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004.
3. Hauerwas, Stanley; Willimon, William. Where Resident Aliens Live. Exercises for Christian Practice. Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, 1996.

In his Confessions, Augustine describes his struggle with the problem of evil. Augustine finally came to understand, paradoxical though it may sound, that evil does not exist because “existence” names all that is created and everything created is good. He observes that there are separate parts of God’s creation, which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things. But there are other things with which they are in accord and so they are good. For example, the sky, which can be cloudy or windy, suits the earth for which it exists. Augustine observes, therefore, that “it would be wrong for me to wish that these earthly things did not exist, for even if I saw nothing but them, I might wish for something better, but still I ought to praise you for them alone. . . . And since this is so, I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole of creation and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.” (Augustine 1961, 7, 12)

Augustine learned not to judge the birds of the air or the lilies of the field. But he tells us that this was but the beginning of his lesson in not judging. He had yet to come to terms with his pride. To find that “log” required that he encounter the stories of Victorinus and Anthony. It was their stories that led him to face the humiliation of the cross of Christ. Only then was Augustine able to confess that evil was “not out there,” but rather resided in his will. Augustine confesses: “I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I need to enjoy you, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is man, like them (I Timothy 2:5), and also rules as God over all things, blessed for ever (Romans 9:15). He it was who united with our flesh that food which I was too weak to take. For I was not humble enough to conceive of the humble Jesus Christ as my God, nor had I learnt what lesson his human weakness was meant to teach.” (Augustine 1961, 7, 18)

Crucial, though, is that this division not be understood as an ontological given, a dualism that frustrates the witness of the church. The difference between church and world is not a given, but rather a difference between agents. The difference between church and world is not that of realms or levels, but of response (Yoder 1964, 31–32).

John Milbank observes that before a gift can be given it must have already started to be received (2003, 156).

For example, Jesus’s admonition that everything we do to others should be done as we would have them do to us is often thought to have been given more exact formulation in Kant’s famous statement of the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (1959, 39).

Yet Kant’s statement of the categorical imperative is an attempt to free us of the need to rely on forgiveness and, more critically, a savior. Kant’s hope was to make us what our pride desires, that is, that we be autonomous. To be free in Kant’s sense requires that we rely on reason qua reason. To rely on any resource other than reason is to abandon ourselves to irrational authorities. According to Kant, no reasonable person should believe that his or her sins can be forgiven without that person doing the work necessary to transform his or her life. To be forgiven by another would force us to acknowledge that our lives depend on being capable of receiving a gift without regret. But from Kant’s perspective such a capacity for reception makes the moral life impossible. Jesus knows nothing of a realm that Kant called “ethics.”