Shayne Looper: A favorite (and frequently misunderstood) Bible verse
It has been said that the most quoted verse in the Bible is no longer John 3:16 but instead Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
That is not surprising. Personal freedom is the touchstone of the era. Everyone should be able to do what they want, and no one should judge them for it. In earlier times, what marked a person as genuinely spiritual was love, a positive thing. Now, it is the absence of judgment, a negative thing.
Even a quick reading of Matthew 7, with its famous verse about not judging, will reveal that Jesus did not approach this subject like a typical postmodern. His very next words affirm that human beings will be judged, and he clearly instructs people to acknowledge their own failures.
Jesus did not prohibit people from making judgments about what is right; he elsewhere urges his hearers to do just that. He was not silencing people on issues of right and wrong or saying that morality is a personal matter. Anyone who has read Jesus’s words knows that cannot be true.
The command against judging is clearly not an endorsement of moral relativism. That, however, does not mean that we can fulfill Jesus’s command simply by affirming absolute truth. Jesus was not giving his students a philosophical model. He was telling them to stop judging other people.
Judging others is so common that most people don’t realize they are doing it. It is a habit that develops early and often continues throughout life. Why do we do it? It is the easy way to feel righteous. To judge people is to use them, usually unbeknownst to them, to boost our own self-esteem.
The religion of self-righteousness with its sacramental condemnations and ceremonies of judgment is not limited to religious people, whether Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, or Muslims. It is open to all, including atheists. It is a religion anyone can join. More than that, it is a religion everyone has joined. We have all sacrificed someone else on its altar.
However, the religion of self-righteousness is one that Jesus rejected and wants his students to utterly renounce. Simply no judgment. No condemnation.
But don’t some people need to be condemned? What about pedophiles, rapists, and perpetrators of domestic violence? What about the Bernie Madoff’s of the world, who steal from the vulnerable? What about Adolph Hitler and the Nazis? Does justice not demand our condemnation of such people?
Justice demands that we condemn their actions, and it may require society to punish them for what they have done. But Jesus’s followers are not permitted to condemn the person. God alone is wise enough and loving enough to bear that responsibility.
Bolstering self-esteem is not the only reason people condemn others. Condemnation is also used to force people to modify their behavior. This happens all the time on social media, where people with itchy “Twitter-fingers” try to shame others out of what they deem to be socially inappropriate behavior.
Dallas Willard called this “condemnation engineering” and noted that it often happens in families. Indeed, it happens in families more often than anywhere else. Of course, parents only threaten their children with condemnation for their own good, but the result is never good.
How can people break free of the habit of judging others? First, they must intend to do so. Long-held habits don’t go away by themselves. Until a person says, “I will stop doing this,” the behavior will not stop.
But people cannot stop judging others until they become honest about their own failures. This is what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? … first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Until we are prepared to see the wrongs in our own lives, we are not ready to point out the wrongs in others. When we are looking for other people’s sins, we cannot help but be blind to our own.
— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: A favorite (and frequently misunderstood) Bible verse
