So, those who have been following along know that I am supposed to be dealing with the first part of Matthew 7 now. Our text should be,
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces. Matthew 7:1—6
As I write this, I realize that this is my fifth major attempt to expound this passage, not counting minor efforts to pull a prior major effort out of the trash bin. I finished writing on chapter 6 in early November and didn’t have to deliver that message until December. So as far as scheduling I was sitting pretty. Now, you might expect that as usual I procrastinated but I didn’t this time. I buckled right down and tried to find my way through chapter 7 pretty diligently and have stuck with it. And so, it is only after 3 months of trying to preach this text that I am here to concede my failure. I won’t be teaching on the first part of Matthew 7 because I can’t. There are basically two problems with teaching it and one problem with not teaching it, none of which I can get over or around. I will start with the one problem with not teaching ‘Judge not that you be not judged.’ When I saw my failure in early January I attempted to ‘take a break’ and talk to you about John 3 instead. I have wanted to talk about the first chapters of John’s Gospel for a long time and started getting some pretty good insights when I looked into it. Hopefully I’ll get to share them someday but the more I saw in John the more clear it was that I was supposed to be in Matthew. I’m not sure why. I’m not gonna say some woo-woo spiritual thing but this is where I am. It may seem weird or funny but there is sort of no escape. I am locked in to making an open show of my failure.
So, if ‘Judge not that you be not judged’ is what I have to teach then what is holding me back from teaching it? Basically, I am too full of shit.1 Let me unpack that for you a bit. Christ spent chapters 5 and 6 showing how wrong our judgments are. Briefly He tells us that His blessings are not given to the spiritually rich, or the happy and content, or the bold and assertive, or those who have righteousness and, I might add, good judgment. The Lord instead blesses sinners, the spiritually poor, the vagabonds and ragamuffins who remain empty, hungry, and thirsty after we have poured out our moral excellence and eloquence on them2. He blesses those who aren’t doing great, who don’t walk in the church with head held high, happy at the thought of sharing their righteousness and their Facebook worthy life with their admiring fellow believers. No! Christ’s blessing is for the mournful, the depressed, the weary, as Brennan Manning had it, the beat-up, the broke-down, and the burnt out. His blessing is for the meek, those who have been broken and beaten by enemies stronger and more cunning than they are, and have given up on fighting back. We judge wrongly when we imagine that the prosperous, the intelligent, the discerning, the good-looking, the healthy, or the cheerful enjoy the Lord’s blessing. It is the persecuted and mocked, the outcasts, the Involuntarily Celibate(Incels), the lonely wine-aunts and solitary cat-uncles, the obese, the addicted, the internet crazies, the depressed, the despairing, and the deceived who He has chosen for His benediction. It is through these jars of clay, these stumbling blocks that He works building His kingdom. It is not the movers and shakers and king makers that light and salt the world but those that we mock and pass-by on the other side of the road. That’s the truth, but that’s not the way that it seems to me.
There is a bit of a paradox in trying to preach this passage. What the text calls for is for me to tell you about my wrong judgments, but they don’t seem wrong to me and if I tell you that I am wrong but don’t believe it then I am just stupid, meaningless noise. Essentially, I need to look around my lower colon and tell you how far up it my head is but its too dark inside to read a tape measure and pulling it out isn’t going that well. It feels like a long way out.
My judgment gets everything all backwards and the Kingdom of Heaven can be summed up as being the clear opposite of however things seem to me. What I call wisdom, prudence, and religion; He calls foolishness, darkness, and idolatry3. I crave the works and busyness and anxiety of Martha. He dotes on the single-minded Mary who only sits at His feet and basks in His rest, without a shred of righteousness of her own, as careless and free as the birds of the air, as idle as the lilies of the field.
3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
We have cast ourselves in the roles of teachers and healers, but we really ought to be students and patients. We cannot see because there is too much going on in our own eye. It isn’t simple or single as chapter 6 said and so our eye is dark. I am blind because I am looking at too many things, considering too many angles, solving too many puzzles. The only way that I could help you with your vision problems is to not look at your eye or what is in it at all, but even while performing the surgery to look past you and through you to the kingdom and righteousness of God. All of my calculations and manipulations only make me stupid and useless for the one thing that I actually give a damn about. As He said to the Pharisees, ‘If you were blind you would have no sin, but because you say “I see” your sin remains.’4 And every time, that I try and explain these verses I go back into the ‘I see’ camp.
I said that there were two reasons why I can’t explain these verses to you, and I have dealt now fairly well with my personal failings but the text in and of itself presents insurmountable difficulties. I’ve said over and over that the Lord’s Sermon is about things that are entirely antithetical, that cannot cohabitate at all, light and darkness, love and hate, sincerity and hypocrisy, Gospel and Law, Christ and Mammon. Well, judging and not judging is the same way. We read these words and imagine that He means, ‘Judge less or judge more mercifully and it will go better for you at the judgment.’ But the larger context of the sermon and the logic of these very words excludes that interpretation. You see, no matter how much less we judge, how lenient and merciful a standard that we use, when we are judged by the same standard we will fail. There is no bar so low that we can get over it. We are essential, congenital losers. We massage His words to say ‘judge less’ because ‘judge never not at all’ is inconceivable to us. But Paul confirms that Christ means ‘judge never not at all’ by saying essentially the same thing in 1 Corinthians 4:
But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by a human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I know of nothing against myself, yet I am not justified by this; but He who judges me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts. Then each one’s praise will come from God. 1 Corinthians 4:3—5
I mean you can judge if you want to, just hang on a second until the Lord comes back. I can’t tell you what it looks or feels like to judge never not at all because I don’t know any more than you do. But I do know that to judge less is not grace or even mercy. It is just cheap law. Grace and mercy don’t mean a secondhand, thrift store law. They mean a law paid for at full price by someone else and I want to say to anyone who thinks Grace is just clipping coupons on the Law that you don’t seem to have ever encountered the thing itself, so look up you have some pretty amazing surprises in your future. Anyway, from Scripture we can make a case for either ‘judge’ or ‘judge not’ but ‘judge less’ is indefensible, and since ‘judge not’ is inconceivable I hope that I have made my failures clear and plain by this point.
So, I should have begun with, ‘Hi, My name is Jon and I am a judgoholic.’ I stand before this text an utter failure in the most complete way imaginable. Which is surprisingly a good thing. Because these words are pure and absolute Law, condemning me, breaking me, bringing me down to the very grave is the purpose for which Christ spoke these words and they’re doing a fabulous job.5 The pattern of the Law is, ‘The man who keeps it shall live. The man who keeps it not shall die.’6 Could ‘judge not that you be not judged’ fit that pattern any more exactly? This text is a requirement with a blessing for success and a curse for failure and trying to shoehorn it into Gospel is an impossibility. This law, ‘Judge not that you be not judged.’ seems so hard because it is a law of the type that is absolutely the worst, most miserable for us. It is a law commanding rest, like the Sabbath, surely the most broken of all commandments. We are commanded to wait on the Lord for judgment, to trust the matter to Him but our lack of faith and patience makes this an impossibility.
The Lord brings the full weight of His Law to bear on me and I am utterly broken under my entirely sensible condemnation. But He isn’t like me. I judge and condemn because of envy and pride. He judges and condemns, confines us all under sin, out of goodness in order that He might have mercy. He casts down that He might raise up, kills that He might make alive.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:7—12
The fulfillment of this Law is an impossible matter for us. The more we try and the more we look at it the more clear that becomes. I find myself completely crushed by it. But having broken us, He lifts us up tenderly. Christ does not destroy the Law, as He would if He cheapened it or made some sort of end run around it. Rather, He establishes the Law by teaching the one and only way that it can be fulfilled, by free gift alone. No amount of grunting and struggling and working and abstaining and suffering will ever get us one step closer to waiting and trusting which is what is truly commanded in ‘Judge not that you be not judged’, as Paul showed us. To fulfill the Law is as easy as to ask. I would not judge if I sought only One Thing, the kingdom and righteousness which Christ gives as a gift, fulfillment of the Law would be graciously added or it wouldn’t. If I sought only one thing I could accept either outcome. It is my desires for other things, a righteousness of my own, worldly treasure, peace on Earth, whatever that make me a blind and hypocritical judgoholic. The absolute and emphatic terms of this Gospel, ‘everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened’ drives away all of the doubt and darkness of my failure; all based simply on the goodness of God and the explicit promise of His Christ. All of the ‘being Christlike’, sanctification, mortification, all of that is yours just for the asking, is set before you in the Communion of the Saints. The answer to that request may not fit your preconceptions but your judgment is shit anyway, so take and eat.
Part 2: Persecution as Salt and Light
Part 3: Free Legal Advice for the Guilty
Part 4: Charity and your Social Credit Score
My apologies for the language. Sometimes the need for plainness from the pulpit trumps the need for decorum. I don’t use foul language to be shocking or funny but to me the language of the Georgia laborer, sort of my native tongue, is unmatched for its combination of plainness and subtlety and so I resort to it in situations like this.
My self righteousness is a gift that keeps on giving. Even after I drown you in it like gravy on a biscuit I am still full to the brim.
‘39 And Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.”
40 Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, “Are we blind also?”
41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore your sin remains.’ From John 9, an excellent diagnosis of my problem from the Great Physician.
And if I was better at distinguishing Law and Gospel I might have saved myself quite a bit of misery.
Leviticus 18:5 cited and expounded in Romans 10. But for a real look at what Law looks and feels like nothing beats the whole of Deuteronomy 28.
Tough sledding for the expositor.
One can't escape the command to judge in all of Scripture; whether it is ourselves or others, in the Body or outsiders. Because we have a standard, we must judge. John 7:24 gives us the tool to be good judges; "Judge rightly." How hard can it be?
Jesus complicates everything when He starts examining the heart of the matter. "Go, and sin no more." Our incapacity does not relieve us of the responsibility.
Thank you.
Jon, my only comment is to remember that it is in teaching that you will learn. My advice for what it is, is ask God to tell you how to teach this lesson. Please continue, I am very interested in hearing more.