by Roy Lawrence
‘Judge not that you be not judged,' says Jesus. His words have been preserved for us both by St Matthew and by St Luke in their Gospels (Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37). Many years ago they came to life for me in a very personal way.
I was a teenager at the time and was attending a midnight service in one of our local churches at Christmas. These late services can sometimes be attended by people who are distinctly the worse for drink. They often go to a party first and then after knocking back an amount of alcohol start to feel religious and sway their way to church. On this occasion, as I sat waiting for the service to start, in came a middle-aged couple. The woman more or less steered the man to a pew and then started to tell him just what was happening in a penetrating stage whisper. ‘Vicar's coming in now' she said. ‘Choir's here too.' ‘Service'll start soon. I fumed as I watched and listened. How could anyone say their prayers with this sort of distraction happening? Afterwards I buttonholed the vicar and said ‘Did you see that man and that woman?
His reply was, ‘Yes, wasn't it great? You know, don't you, that he is blind, but every Christmas she brings him along to church and helps him find his seat and tells him just what's happening. It makes you feel that the spirit of Christmas is alive and well.'
It certainly had not been alive and well in me, and I felt the words of Jesus rise up out of the Bible and hit me between the eyes. ‘Judge not that you be not judged!'
It happened all over again years later when I was at my Theological College.
A friend and I had gone to attend the morning service at the church of a small parish nearby. The service was truly awful. The vicar lost his way in the prayer book, couldn't find the right prayers, did not seem to know which psalms and canticles we should be singing and in general made a mess of things. Once again I felt the spirit of judgement rising in me. Afterwards I told my friend just what I thought about the incompetence of it all.
‘Oh, I thought you knew,' he said, and he told me that the vicar had been a prisoner of war in a Japanese concentration camp and that he had been so tortured and abused that his mind had suffered badly. He was a broken man when he finally came home but the diocese had put him in this small parish in the hope that the well known services and familiar routine would rehabilitate him. ‘He really is much better now,' said my friend, ‘and he may well make a complete recovery in time.'
Once again the words of Jesus hit me between the eyes. ‘Judge not that you be not judged.'
Three reasons not to judge
Over the years I have thought of three good reasons why Jesus is absolutely right and we should be extremely reluctant ever to sit in judgement of our fellow human beings.
The first is that fallible as we are, we never know all the facts. The American Indians have a proverb. ‘Never judge another human being until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.' As in the case of the blind man at the midnight service and the ex-prisoner of war in the small parish, I have found it all too easy to leap to an ignorant conclusion, of which I was subsequently bitterly ashamed.
The second is that if we ourselves were judged in the same way in which we too easily pass judgement on others, we might not come out of the process at all well. There is a saying, ‘When I point a finger at my neighbour, there are three more pointing back at me.' Try pointing, and see the truth of it for yourself.
Perhaps the third reason is the most important one of all. Judgement is actually God's business and not ours. It is God who is' the Judge of the earth', says the psalmist 1, and the Book of Revelation says exactly the same. ‘It is the Lord God who judge.' 2 Look up the word ‘Judgement' in a Biblical concordance and see how often it applies to God and how rarely to us. Of course, it is important that we should judge the difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between good and evil. But passing judgement on people is entirely a different matter. Scripture tells us that this is God's business. We should leave it to him.
A final story
Just to hammer home the point, my mind goes back to a former friend, who was a fellow student with me when I was at Oxford. He used to tell a story about an uncle of his who, he said, worked on the railways as a wheel-tapper. I can't guarantee that it is true, but we used to enjoy hearing it from him from time to time.
Every morning, so the tale went, my friend's uncle would take his hammer and go along to the railway sidings. The hammer would be swung at the wheels of carriage after carriage, and whenever there was a cracked sound, that particular carriage would be sent back to the railway shed for checking. The story was that one day my friend's uncle had sent back a good half dozen carriages – before he finally realized that he was using a cracked hammer!
It is so easy for the hammer of our judgement to be cracked. It can be cracked by ignorance, cracked by prejudice, cracked by punctured pride, cracked by our sheer fallibility.
As always the advice of Jesus is sound and good. The hammer of God's judgement is never cracked. So it really is best to leave the business of judgement to him!
1. Psalm 42:2
2. Revelation 18:8
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