The Lord's use of language in this passage calls for comment. There is a playful touch of exaggeration in it so entertaining that it removes any offence from what He is saying. While He touches us on the raw, He makes us laugh!
See this man with a broom handle sticking out of his eye, trying to pick a midge out of his friend's eye. It is a delicate operation to pick a speck out of someone's eye; but this fellow has to steady himself and squint down a long pole while he does it, trying to keep the thing from wobbling about. And see the farmer, in muddy gum boots, with a straw in his mouth, emptying a bucket of shimmering pearls proudly into a pig trough, where the pigs snort and squeal and scatter them about, angry with frustrated hunger, while he says, with a fond look in his eye and a silly smile, "Nothing but the best for my pigs, you know!"
Long familiarity has dulled our appreciation of the liveliness and vigour which was such a feature of the Lord's teaching. "The common folk heard Him gladly." He was fun to listen to. Nowhere, perhaps, is it more important to be aware of that than here, where He cautions us against censoriousness. Even as He condemns our destructive habit of criticising one another, He is obviously not Himself infected by it. He does it in a warm, genial, big-hearted spirit.
When He says, "Judge not," we know what He means; we are to stop running one another down. He hardly needs to tell us that; we all know it is wrong - though we do it anyway!
What is of intense interest is the reason Jesus gives why it is wrong, because once we see His reason, it will stop us doing it. What Jesus says here packs a real punch. If we once really hear so as to understand Him, we will never do it again: or if we do, we will know what a frightening thing it is we are doing. The reason He gives is in verse 2: "Judge not, that you be not judged."
Reflect first on the reasons Jesus does not give, which we often do.
i. Ignorance of people's real motives
He does not, in the first place, exhort us to curb our criticisms of other people because we are ignorant of their real motives, or because we do not know what struggles they may be secretly having. "You don't know what the poor guy has to put with. If you did, you wouldn't be so quick to criticise." That sort of thing. "To understand all is to forgive all."
It commends itself to our better natures, this, because it pleads for us to be big-hearted. It requires us to make an effort of sympathetic imagination, really to try and imagine what it is like to stand in the other fellow's shoes before we sound off about him. That is a good and useful exercise at any time - and not least when we are praying for someone! We should do it more often; our criticism would shrink while our compassion grew.
But it is not the reason Jesus gave. "Judge not that you be not judged" is what He said. That is not the same thing at all.
There is a weakness in the argument just considered which robs it of the power to make any real difference in the long run. And Jesus knows it. He knows, as you and I know, that to understand our neighbour completely may not at all mean we forgive him everything. If we really knew all about him, there might be things we would have to condemn. He might really have no excuse at all for what he did! If my neighbour understood me completely, would he be obliged to forgive me all my faults and failures? We have only to ask the question to find ourselves feeling that perhaps this is a line of argument it would be safer not to pursue. Are we blameless - or do we know deep down that no matter what we have had to put up with, it should not have turned us sour? When every excuse has been made, we know we should have done better. We need to be forgiven, not excused.
So this argument is really rather shallow. Sometimes there really is a midge in our neighbour's eye. Jesus Himself here admits that; and it would do our neighbour good to have it removed. "I know it, you know it, and he knows it too," Jesus says.
ii. We are no better ourselves
Another reason often given why we should not run each other down is that we are no better ourselves. We have a pole in our own eye!
Now Jesus does say this. But He says more, to which we shall come in a moment. Look first at this argument, though.
A recognition of our own failings can silence our criticism of others. One of the most effective 'gob-stoppers' I was ever handed was a Pastoral Counselling course I did in London, Dr Frank Lake's course of Clinical Theology. As we worked through the dynamics of the personality distortions that afflict us - depressive, hysterical, schizoid, paranoid, phobic, obsessive and so on - it was as though scales were falling from my eyes. I understood at last why this man in my congregation was such a misery, why that woman made such an insufferable nuisance of herself, why that chap had such a chip on his shoulder and was for ever standing on 'points of order' in members' meetings, and why that woman had such an acid tongue, and why there are people who just will not budge. And just as I felt I was getting my congregation all buttoned up, it boomeranged! I became aware of all the twistedness in myself. Hidden depths in me stood revealed that I had never seriously looked at in myself before ... of pride, of arrogance, of unbelief, of lust, of rage, of dread, of duplicity. I began to see with what tenacity we cling to the defensive barriers we erect against the emergence of all this 'truth of the inward parts.' I was alarmed to discover that the more I stood revealed in my shabby rags and tatters, the more desperately I clutched them to me. There were sins I loved! It silenced me. I stopped sounding off about other people's faults. I realised I shared them all. I was myself a mirror image of those who plagued me. Precisely those faults in others that annoyed me most were mine. I learned that you cannot point an accusing finger at anybody without pointing three at yourself! Who was I to condemn others, I who stood condemned myself?
God used the experience to give me a real taste of His wrath. I knew God was angry with me - rightly. When Paul declares that "we all lived in the passions of the flesh, following the desires of body and mind, so that we were, by nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind," I have no quarrel with him. He speaks the sober truth. Never mind about the midges in my neighbours' eye: I know I have a great log sticking out of mine.
But unfortunately, if this were all Jesus had to say to us, it would still not be enough. Because there is a perceptive little devil in us all that sees very clearly that we are all in the same boat. We all do deserve the tongue-lashing we sometimes get, and the criticisms we resent are true, many of them. So why not have a go at each other? We do merit it! You are a sinner too, as I am, so why shouldn't I give as good as I'm given? So this insight, which is true as far as it goes, still will not silence me. There has to be something more. And Jesus supplies it.
If I may refer again to my own experience (in the end, every man must speak out of that), I rediscovered Paul's great "But God ..." (Eph. 2:4) Having described us all as children of wrath, he goes on, "But God, Who is rich in mercy, out of the great love wherewith He loved us, saved us by His Grace."
It is a very blessed business to experience the grace of God: to know yourself lifted out of the realm of condemnation and set down in the realm of grace. I knew that God did truly love and forgive me, because I discovered from the Scripture that to do so He gathered to His heart, with me, the sin in me that angered Him, suffering the 'death' it deals Him to do so, and 'put it away' from between us in His own pain. I knew I was forgiven, truly and most blessedly - but at a cost. I do not cease to marvel that He meets it. So great is the love God bears us that, to embrace us, it breaks through even His own righteous anger. He loves us to His own great hurt, and the marvel is that not only does He not hold our sin against us, He does not hold against us either the hurt it does Him. That is how we are forgiven. Those are the grounds on which our forgiveness rests.
But the moment I condemn my brother, I reject all that. I am telling God I do not want grace to prevail. I want it for myself, but not for my brother. "Grace, Lord, for me, please - but judgment for him."
And Jesus says we cannot have that; God will simply not allow it. "If you do not forgive your brother from the heart (and that means you love him), neither will your Heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses." (Matt. 6:15, 18:35) There is no way this can be watered down. Jesus meant exactly what He said. There are no escape clauses. We can plead no extenuating circumstances. This is the one point where Grace itself is as hard as nails. If you will not forgive your brother the way God has forgiven you, then you fling salvation back in God's face, and say "I don't want it." And you will not be given it!
So now we hear the reason Jesus did give loud and clear:
You cannot judge your brother without rejecting your own salvation.
"Judge not, that you be not judged." That is the reason Jesus gives why we must not judge one other.
God says to me, "Son, I have set you free from the guilt of all your sin. You live now in the sunlit country of my forgiving grace. But if you judge your brother, if you demand that the searing light of condemnation shall fall upon him, you must stand in it yourself. The measure you give will be the measure you get."
In the moment I condemn my brother, I rush away from the realm of grace and back into the realm of judgment. I cannot put my brother there without, in the process, going back there with him. I cannot have it both ways: "Grace for me, but judgment for him." The moment I condemn another, I make Christ of no advantage to me. I blacken the sunlight of His grace with dark clouds of judgment, and I must myself perish in the storm I bring upon him. That is why Jesus reminds us that we have telegraph poles sticking out of our own eyes.
Those who are themselves forgiven should be forgiving. "He who is forgiven much loves much," as Jesus said (Luke 7:47)
"Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get." (Luke 6:37-8) We have to choose. We cannot have grace at all except we have it for our brother with us. "We know that we have passed out of death into life," said John "because we love our brothers." (I John 3.14) Condemn our brother and we fling God's grace back in His face, rejecting our own salvation.
And then Jesus goes on at once to say: "Don't cast your pearls before swine, or give holy things to dogs." And how can we follow that advice except by making up our mind who are pigs and who are dogs? So we do have to make judgments about people after all!
How can we reconcile these two apparently conflicting requirements: "Don't judge; do judge"? The confusion arises because we use the word 'judge' in two quite different senses, meaning to run people down, or to weigh them up.
To run others down is wrong, as we have seen; to weigh them up is right, as Jesus says we must. A girl had better weigh a man up before she marries him. A man had better be sure of his friend before he takes him into a business partnership . A congregation has to size up a minister before appointing him (and the minister the church). Congregations must weigh their choice of men to serve them as deacons and church officers. The Scriptures themselves have a lot to say about that, in the letters to Timothy and Titus. You do not appoint just anybody to be a deacon - you choose men of proven Christian character who will form a real team to lead the church with wisdom and love, with vision and courage.
Now this sort of thing is not at all the same as condemning them. It is quite possible to reach a judgment about folk in this way without bearing them the least illwill, or holding them in any sort of contempt. We are not selecting only a man's faults for attention, wanting to see him humiliated. We may indeed reckon in his weaknesses with his strengths when we assess him in this way, for our assessment will be worthless if it is not realistic; but we shall be doing it, not out of any wish to demean him, but rather out of a wish to help him (where he needs it) or to encourage him (where he could do with it) or to protect him (perhaps against himself, for we do a man a mischief if we burden him with responsibilities he has neither the ability nor the character to carry). We need not be censorious when we do this, only discriminating. What a shame it is that the word 'discrimination' has become a dirty word. Get rid of discrimination, and you get rid of standards, which is exactly what is happening in our society today. You deny merit. Discriminating we have to be. The Son of God Himself, no less, here tells us so.
We need often to pray that we be "given a right judgment in all things." We must, as Jesus said on another occasion, "be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." If we are not, if we are as silly as doves, we shall end up becoming as harmful as serpents. We need to be tough-minded as well as tender-hearted (to quote Martin Luther King).
But all such judgments we must reach from the standpoint of grace, in a generous spirit, out of a wish to build our brother up, not drag him down. It is not easy. It is a path beset with traps for the unwary. We can so easily fall prey to the temptation to let our weighing up degenerate into loveless and arrogant criticism. So Paul says in Gal. 6:1-2, "My brothers, if one of you is detected in some sin, those among you who are spiritual should quietly set him back on the right path, not with any feeling of superiority, but being on guard yourselves against temptation. We must carry one another's loads: that is how we fulfil the Law of Christ," Who said, "Take my yoke upon you." He takes the strain with us.
We often have to walk a tight-rope between Christian concern on the one hand and unchristian censoriousness on the other.
Small wonder Jesus goes on at once to commend prayer to us! "Ask, and it will be given you, seek and you shall find, knock and it will be opened to you." In the context in which Jesus said it, the thing uppermost in His mind that we need to ask and seek and knock for is a 'right judgment in all things.' We need wisdom - wisdom which is truly loving and at the same time truly discriminating. We must be down to earth even while we reach up to Heaven.
The whole section is all tied up together in one bundle. Jesus has not suddenly changed the subject when He goes on to talk about asking and seeking and knocking, for He says, "So ... whatever you wish men should do to you, do so to them; for this is the Law and the Prophets." This is the sum of all goodness and truth.
Neglect to pray, and see if our relationships do not start fouling up!
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