Advent is a sober time of waiting and during this time it was traditional to think particularly about the second coming and the four last things. I’ll leave the second coming for another occasion and, today, take one of the four last things. The four last things, as you probably know, are heaven and hell, judgement and death – and traditionally we considered these as a preparation for the great festival which celebrates the birth of Jesus. These four last things are pretty sobering aren’t they: death, heaven, hell and judgement – no wonder they are often ignored in this world where so much that is uncomfortable to consider is swept under the carpet. Let’s today therefore take the perhaps least disturbing of these four last things – judgement.
“Judge not, that you be not judged” Matt 7:1.
This extract from the Sermon on the Mount demonstrates that as so often with his teaching, Jesus had a tremendous knowledge of both the Old Testament and the teaching of the Rabbis.
For the Rabbis taught that for a person to attain credit in this world and the next he should “visit the sick, be generous with his hospitality, devote himself to prayer, devote himself to the education of his children in the Law and, most importantly, look for and bring out the best in other people”.
It is this latter point which Jesus is concentrating on in this part of his sermon. Of course he is not saying that you must not ever judge others. Many of us in our daily lives have to exercise judgement over others, some perhaps formally as a magistrate or a member of a jury, others perhaps as managers endeavouring to lead and bring out the best in their staff and perhaps most of us in our lives as we endeavour to get on with our fellow human beings. The essential point Jesus is making is that in judging others we should use the same criteria or standards of judgement by which we ourselves would be happy to be judged.
This is, in fact, extremely difficult. William Barclay in his discourse on judgement highlights three reason why this is so.
First, we can never know the full facts about a person, and we can never know the whole person. Some years ago, the Law Lords removed from the Home Secretary the right to have his say on the length of sentence that should apply to particularly notorious criminals. I would imagine that this view, that we can never know the full facts about a person, weighed heavily with the Law Lords when they came to their decision – even the Judge who has sat throughout the trial will not know all of the facts but he will be able to form a better judgement than a Home Secretary who will be reliant upon second hand reports of the trial.
Secondly, we can never be strictly impartial in our judgement of others – our prejudices will often blind us to one aspect or other of a person’s character.
And thirdly, it follows from these two reasons, no one is actually good enough fully to judge another person.
I expect many of you reading this could quote examples where judgements have been wildly in error – there are of course some famous ones. I think I may have mentioned in my sermons before when talking about judgement that it was once said of a singer that she had such an appalling voice that she should be muzzled. That singer was to become one of the greatest sopranos – Dame Nellie Melba.
That example was probably typical of minor errors of judgement that are happening everyday – minor so far as an organisation is concerned but major so far as the individual is concerned. And of course, there are so many other examples: an audience watching a football or cricket match judging the umpire, OFSTED judging the teacher or even, dare I suggest it, a congregation judging their minister. Maybe it could be deduced then from this passage of the sermon that no one should criticise another unless they themselves are willing to enter the same situation and be that umpire, that teacher or that preacher.
That would clearly be impractical, and I believe that the message of this passage is that we have enough of a problem trying to sort our own lives out without forming a judgement on how others live theirs, assuming of course that that life is not impinging adversely on others and breaking the law of the land.
So, from this passage – from the Sermon on the Mount – we might conclude that we should avoid judgement ourselves and leave it all to God.
This, I think, would be to neglect our duty to act as God’s steward on earth exercising our God given talents to the best of our limited abilities. However, we do have to be aware of the dangers of forming judgements too quickly, of forming judgements without knowing as many facts about a situation as possible and remain aware that for the reasons I have mentioned earlier we can never achieve a perfect judgement – we can only strive to do our best.
In today’s highly competitive world, we are all encouraged to be the best – be that in work or in recreation. The result of this stress on competition is that one measures one’s self esteem by whether or not one is better than someone else. As the spiritual writer Gerard Hughes puts it “we are creatures of anxiety, and the deepest fear in us is the fear of annihilation, of being literally a nobody. One way of countering this fear is to feel superior to someone in at least one respect – someone is inferior, therefore I am.”
We see examples of this everywhere – an education system that is everyday more concerned with competition than with cooperation, from SATS test in primary school to A levels in the sixth form. And since the 1980s we are only too aware of the constant emphasis on an economic system based entirely on market forces.
“Jesus said “Let the person without sin cast the first stone”. To quote Gerard Hughes again “We can never assess the inner guilt of another person, because we cannot know the past influences which are now affecting them, the pressures that afflict them. We can say that their behaviour is objectively wrong, but we can never know their inner guilt before God.” The only person we can truly judge is ourself and “if we bring ourselves before God and acknowledge our guilt, God never refuses forgiveness”.
We must never therefore condemn another person in our hearts, for in refusing to forgive them, we are refusing to let God be the God of forgiveness to ourselves.
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk
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