Judging We Are Judged

No one likes to be judged, but everybody does it. Outside the church, of course, are those who embrace a relativistic ethic, wherein there is no objective right or wrong. Suggest otherwise to these good people, however, and you will know they believe you have embraced something objectively wrong. The one iron-clad moral law of our age is “Thou shalt not say there are any moral laws.” Inside the church things happen a smidge differently.

Here too we judge those who judge, citing, usually wrongly if I might make a judgment, Matthew 7:1, Judge not, lest ye be judged. Worse still however is not that we judge judgers, but that we judge non-judgers, simply on the basis that we “feel” judged. Consider this account I once read on a blog. Woman A is bemoaning the awful, evil, stench straight from hell judgmental-ness of hardcore, conservative homeschoolers. She explained how she was out doing some shopping, dressed in pants. She walked into a store, and there, doing her shopping, was Woman B, a member of Woman A’s church, dressed in a skirt. Woman B always wore a skirt or a dress, and so Woman A retired to her car, unable to shop, crying her eyes out because she was being judged by Woman B for wearing pants. Now if you think it not a bad thing for women to wear pants, chances are you sympathize with woman A. Even if you believe women shouldn’t wear pants, chances are you wish Woman B wouldn’t be so judgmental. But what, friends, has Woman B done? She dressed herself, and she went shopping. She said nothing, and as far as we know thought nothing at all about Woman A and her pants. Yet, Woman A is alone in her car casting all manner of judgment, all manner of private, secret (until she wrote the blog piece) bile against her sister. We know this not because we are free to guess what others might be thinking, but because Woman A told us in her own blog, without the least hint of irony.

Somehow we have come to believe that believing and practicing this belief or that is tantamount to practicing the inquisition against those who don’t so practice. Substitute masks for skirts if you like. Substitute opening, or not opening the doors of the church building. Substitute blacking out your instagram. This is what Matthew 7:1 is all about. When we do have a judgmental attitude, that is, not having a view on what is right and wrong, but rather being quick to convict with little or no evidence, we can rest assured that we will be judged in like manner. If you are judging people for what you guess they are thinking in judgment of you, turn around. There is someone secretly judging you in their heart. And you deserve it. Instead why don’t we all try to practice a judgment of charity? Why don’t we move through our days assuming that other people actually like us? That they mean and wish us well? That we can disagree about this issue and that without either side being unduly nasty about it? Maybe we in the church could all dial down the rhetoric, without dialing down our passion for His Word.