Introduction
"Who made you judge?" That is the question of the fourth and final episode of "Foundations," Christian Fellowship Church's four-video series on the Sermon on the Mount. The series host and Charlotte welcome Donna Jennings, who is involved in church life and mission, both locally and internationally, and who is working on a doctorate on Western culture, mission and witness.
The text is Matthew 7:1-6. Jesus uses an almost comic image: a speck in your brother's eye, a plank in your own. For the series host, these are still words that confront us: they are about seeing clearly, "so that we can love one another with gentleness and tenderness, all the way to healing." Faced with these words, we can put them into practice and build on the rock, or we can sit in God's seat and pass a judgment on someone that does not match what Jesus says. The conversation shows what judging is, why we do it, and how to return to grace.
Message outline
1. A passage harder than it looks
- Charlotte admits that, in her view, this is the most complex passage in the series: the more you read what the New Testament says about judgment, the more complicated the subject becomes.
- She points out how wisely Jesus places these words: after pages of teaching on how to live. Because as soon as we know a truth, our first urge is often to use it like a hammer on someone else's head.
- It is a warning for those who know the Scriptures: do not think that, now that you are instructed, your job is to make sure everyone follows the rules.
- Charlotte describes herself as a child who was not content to obey the rules: she was indignant when someone else broke them and wanted the teacher to know. Most of us have this tendency to be outraged at the person who does not do what is right, and it can go wrong very quickly.
2. The speck and the plank are made of the same wood
- The difference in size is comic, but the speck and the plank are made of the same material. Jesus says "hypocrite": to be a hypocrite, you have to judge in someone else what you do yourself.
- Often, what outrages you in someone has its equivalent in you, unnoticed. Charlotte's practical advice: whenever you are angry about what another person does, use it as a springboard to personal reflection and prayer.
- Jesus does not say there is nothing in the other person's eye: the speck is really there. But your plank is a bigger obstacle to your own flourishing and growth. You are the one who must act first: "God, I have a responsibility for myself. Show me what I can confess and repent of."
- When the Holy Spirit has done this work in you, you become gentler toward those who struggle with the same thing. You know how hard it is, you have found tools toward freedom along the way, and you can help with gentle hands.
- This growth in community comes from love and from the experience of our own brokenness, not from a great throne from which we look down on everyone. "When you are up there, you can't see" what is really going on in other people's lives. The passage, the series host notes, keeps talking about looking, eyes and light.
3. Discerning is not judging
- Donna, whom the series host describes as someone who fights for justice, compares the passage to an onion whose layers must be peeled back, "as that wise teacher Shrek taught us." Peeling back those layers, in the text, in our hearts and in our communities, takes time and safety.
- Judgment is not moral discernment. We are called to discern what a good life in Christ looks like: in our personal lives, in community with the church, friends and family, and in society, by looking at what is emerging and asking whether it brings flourishing. Everything depends on the manner.
- For Donna, it was an awakening to recognize Christ as judge. She used to think of judgment as punishment, when it also includes repair, reinstatement and restoration. Christ is the judge of all the earth who will do what is right: he will put an end to everything that is wrong and make right what is not.
- "But that is not my role." It is not her role in your life, nor anyone's role in someone else's life, to put an end to a person.
4. A full stop on someone's life
- For Donna, to judge is to put someone in a box: I perceive you from a distance, I see what you did once, a single thread of your life, and I define you by it and set you aside.
- It is putting a full stop on someone's life, or worse, an exclamation mark. The passage, by the way, speaks of wounding.
- Judging places me above you and not beside you. It destroys community: "we judge because we long to belong, but the way we judge destroys belonging."
- We should learn to read the Sermon on the Mount in the "we" rather than the "you, you and you": it is a way of living together. Jesus knows our tendency toward self-righteousness, which makes us exalt ourselves and leave the mutual submission to which we are all called.
5. Judging in order to belong
- In the rooms where people listen to this, everyone has been judged and everyone has judged: it is our human tendency. Who has never listened to a sermon thinking: "I hope so-and-so is here to hear this"?
- Donna tells of the years she lived in Bangladesh, planting churches among some of the poorest people in the world, in the slums and among textile workers. It was not a moment of sainthood: she found herself facing people who had nothing and had to rethink how she consumed fashion, spent money and celebrated Christmas. Back in a middle-class world, it was easy to think: "we do this, but you do that." Discernment can slide into something else.
- She has also been judged, put in a box, put on a shelf, with a full stop and an exclamation mark on her life, and it hurts. The question is not whether you have judged or been judged, but when, by whom and how.
- She notices that she often judges others on what she herself succeeds at: what she has been through, what gives her worth, what is celebrated from the platform.
- She cites C. S. Lewis's image of the "inner ring": in every community, a church included, there is a central circle that everyone knows without it being named. We all seek to enter it in order to belong, to be safe and to be valued, and we enter it by pushing the other away: "you and I are in, because we are not like that." Judgment then gets mixed up with gossip.
- The series host points out that this is an artificial and fragile belonging, founded on rejecting others. Donna offers instead a community where we take the time to contemplate people, to look at their layers with love: there is always something to learn about life, about them and about ourselves.
6. Returning to grace
- Donna once heard that judgment is the antithesis of grace. If she judges someone, it is a sign that she has stopped living in God's grace, the grace that brought her, like you and like everyone, to God's table and into God's family, "by grace, not by performance."
- We learn how to behave in God's family because we are in it, not the other way around. The first step is to see the other person seated at the table, but first of all to see yourself in your own place, a place shaped by grace.
- "I am more broken than I will ever realize, but I am so much more deeply loved, accepted and invited than I will ever experience." These two paradoxes go together in the way God works. You have to dwell in grace in order to dwell in it with others.
- That way, moral discernment does not tip over into judgment. Donna needs people who have moved further along in life to help her through what she has not yet been through. She is no longer the same as she was ten years ago and hopes not to be the same in ten years.
- A useful question, which the series host keeps: when you notice that you are becoming critical of others, ask yourself whether you have stepped off your own path of grace. For Donna, wanting the other person to "get what they deserve" is the sign that you are swimming against the current.
7. Practices for dwelling in grace
- Judgment does not arrive all at once: it is a posture of the heart that moves from thoughts to words to actions. Hence the importance of intentional practices.
- Donna practices, often in the evening, the Ignatian examen, five questions for looking back over her day. Tomorrow is the only day you are asked to enter and finish. She asks herself: "What is sticking to me?", like those seeds that cling when you walk through a field. And above all: whom have I offended in thought, word or deed? Christ says to go to your brother if you think you have offended him, whereas we often think the opposite.
- In communal worship, she values the space for confession and repentance found in Anglican liturgy or the Book of Common Prayer. If she has reviewed her days, she sees patterns emerge that she can confess on Sunday, under the Word, in mutual submission to Christ. Normalize the fact that we are broken and imperfect beings, and repent together. Advent and Lent are, for her, seasons of returning.
- Some have the gift of seeing a situation clearly and denouncing what needs to be denounced. The challenge is to do it with love, in a way that builds up.
- "God asks us to be a comma in people's lives." Donna thanks the many people who have been commas for her: they let the sentence of her life go on instead of closing it or putting an exclamation mark on it.
- To close the series, Charlotte reminds us that it is not about each of us building our own house, but about being built up together into one holy dwelling. She prays Jesus's prayer in John 17:20-23: "that they may all be one."
Key takeaways
- Jesus does not deny the speck in your brother's eye, but he asks you to remove the plank from your own first.
- What outrages you in another is often made of the same wood as what stays hidden in you: your irritation can become a springboard to prayer.
- Discerning what a good life in Christ looks like is a calling; putting an end to what is wrong and making right what is not is the role of the one judge of all the earth.
- We often judge in order to belong, but judgment destroys belonging and builds closed circles.
- Judgment is the antithesis of grace: to stop judging, you have to return to the table where grace seated you.
Personal application
- What irritates you most about someone right now, and what does that irritation reveal about your own heart?
- In what area might your discernment have slid into judgment, perhaps on a point where you feel strong?
- Have you put someone in a box, or put a full stop on their life based on a single episode?
- Tonight, as you look back over your day, whom might you have offended in thought, word or deed?
- For whom can you be a comma this week?
Verses cited
Frequently asked questions
What does Jesus mean by "do not judge" in Matthew 7?
Jesus is not saying there is never a problem in the other person: he acknowledges that there really is a speck in your brother's eye. But he asks you to start with the plank in your own eye. To judge is to take God's place, to lock someone into what you have seen of them and to place yourself above them rather than beside them. And Jesus warns: you will be measured with the measure you use.
What is the difference between judging and discerning?
Moral discernment is a calling from Christ: seeking what a good life looks like in him, in your personal life, with your church and family, and in society. Judgment, on the other hand, puts a full stop on someone's life. Only Christ, judge of all the earth, can put an end to what is wrong and make right what is not. That role does not belong to you in other people's lives.
How do you remove the plank from your own eye?
When someone irritates or outrages you, use that reaction as a springboard to prayer: ask God whether there is something similar in you to confess. Take a moment each evening to look back over your day, asking whom you have offended in thought, word or deed. And return to grace: you are more broken than you think, but also more loved than you will ever experience.
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