JUDGING AND BEING JUDGMENTAL: They re not the same! By Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

Transcription

1 JUDGING AND BEING JUDGMENTAL: They re not the same! By Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. On January 17, 2000, Newsweek ran a cover story on the AIDS epidemic that is ravaging parts of Africa. The story included heart-breaking photos along with descriptions of entire populations devastated by the killer disease, their medical facilities overwhelmed, their children orphaned by the millions. Newsweek s reporters stated that the epidemic was spreading, in large part, because of promiscuous and unprotected sex. Then on February 7, the magazine published readers letters about the epidemic. Newsweek s editors introduced the letters as follows: Some readers responded to our January 17 cover story on AIDS in Africa with moral advice, urging abstinence and monogamy to slow the epidemic. But most expressed compassion, and many wanted to know how they could help. Remarkable. The editors assumed that if you express moral advice, it can t be compassionate. In their view, the compassionate person never says, Stop having promiscuous and unprotected sex. It s killing you. Instead, she tries to help. How? I guess Newsweek s idea of helping is to alleviate misery by some method other than telling people to stop doing what s causing the misery. That reminds me of the old social worker s story. A social worker stands at the edge of a river and sees a live baby floating by. So he leaps into the river and saves the baby. But in a few minutes another baby floats by. He saves that one too. A little later he sees two more babies. By this point the social worker is still good-willed and trying to help. But at some point he wants to know, Who s putting all those babies in the river? Newsweek s idea, I think, is that we ought to address the symptom, not the cause. Why do we have to do things in this roundabout way? The reason is that if you point out that people are in trouble because they are misbehaving, then you are making a moral judgment about them. And in culturally liberal parts of North America, moral judgments are thought to be wicked. Culturally liberal people believe it s wicked to hold somebody else s behavior up to moral judgment and say, This is wrong, and you can tell it s wrong because it s killing you. Worse, if you do make a moral judgment these days, somebody will try to shut you up by quoting the Bible to you. Culturally liberal people are not always so fond of the Bible, but they often do know a few Bible texts, and one of their favorites comes right from the lips of Jesus. Of course, you know what text I m thinking of. Do not judge, says Jesus in Matthew 7:1. Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. (NRSV). There you have it. A text to comfort secular cultural liberals. Are you Christians offended by partial-birth abortion? they ask. Well, do not judge. Are you disgusted with presidents who disgrace

2 their office? Do not judge. Are you distressed over how many people make babies and do not care for them? Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. And that s it. End of discussion. You protest against evil, and a cultural liberal quotes Jesus to shut you up. Then he goes home happy, and you go home wondering exactly where this interchange ran off the rails. Well, that s why we have little essays in The Banner. My purpose in this one is to try to clarify Matthew 7:1, a statement of Jesus that is routinely misinterpreted. If this text becomes clear to us, we will understand that the editors of Newsweek were mostly out to lunch on February 7, 2000 but not entirely. Maybe they have something to learn about judging, but maybe we have something to learn about being judgmental. And here, as always, there is no better person to learn from than Jesus. JUDGMENTS ARE NECESSARY Do not judge, says Jesus, so that you may not be judged. The first thing to see is that our Lord cannot have meant that we should never make moral judgments. He cannot have meant that we should never look at a cruel act or a dishonest act and say, That s wrong. After all, the Old Testament prophets made moral judgments on every page they wrote. The whole Bible rings with them. The Bible calls us to make them: Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, says Paul (Rom. 12:9, NRSV). Forgive those who trespass against you, says Jesus. And beware of false prophets wolves in sheep s clothing (see Matt. 6:14; 7:15). The fact is, we cannot obey any of these commands without making moral judgments. In Matthew 7:6 Jesus says, Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. I ask you, wouldn t a person have to do a little judging to figure out who the dogs and pigs are? Without making moral judgments you can t protect the innocent, you can t counsel the guilty, you can t even confess your own sins or forgive the sins of someone else. Do not judge, says Jesus. He does not mean that we can just forget about the difference between good and evil. There s something else Jesus doesn t mean. Jesus cannot have meant that we may never appraise each other s character. We have to do that too at school, at work, at home. Every endorsement of a candidate for ministry, every marriage proposal, every choice of a business partner or stockbroker or counselor or baby sitter or confidant every one of these acts requires a judgment. Jesus himself tells us to beware of false prophets. Jesus knows there are some people you can t trust, and he says it s helpful to know who they are. Suppose you choose to tell one of your secrets to someone. Would you ever dream of doing so without judging the character of that person? At minimum, you d have to know

3 whether that person is discreet. Is this someone who can keep a secret? Can this person keep my secret and still love me? Every day we judge each other s character, and we have to. It s not simple moral judgment Jesus rules out; he doesn t even rule out appraisals of human character. So what does Jesus rule out? JUDGMENTS ARE DANGEROUS I think that Jesus allows us to judge but not be judgmental. Jesus allows judgment, but not hasty judgment or self-righteous judgment or presumptuous judgment. And he supports his prohibition by pointing out that such unfair judgments are not only wrong but foolish. And they are foolish because they are boomerangs. Do not judge.for in the same way you judge others, you will be judged right back (Matt. 7:1-2). The interpretive key to this passage was once offered by that great New Testament scholar Mike Ditka, former coach of the Chicago Bears. My friend and colleague Calvin Van Reken (who is a professor of ethics and also a Chicago Bears football fan) once explained this to me. Here s how the story goes. After a member of the Green Bay Packers team had taken a cheap shot at one of Ditka s players, the coach was asked about plans to retaliate. No plans at all, he said. Don t need em. Look, he said, what goes around comes around. What goes around comes around. It s a law of the universe. Do something wrong, and sooner or later the wrong is likely to come right back at you. That s why hateful people are hated. That s why the person who lives by the sword will die by the sword (see Matt. 26:52). You reap what you sow (2 Cor. 9:6). The measure you give is the measure you get (Matt. 7:3). What we have here is a law of the universe so old and deep that the Holy Spirit has formed it into a number of proverbs like the ones I ve just mentioned. In Matthew 7:12 Jesus summarizes this law for us in one of the most famous verses of the Bible: Do to others what you would have them do to you. As my colleague Cal pointed out to me, the Golden Rule is the general rule here. Treat others only as you want to be treated yourself. Jesus gives us the word about judging to apply the Golden Rule. Do not judge, so that you may not be judged means something like, Watch it! Take care in the judging department! Do only the kind of judging you would be willing to have come right back at you.

4 This rules out self-righteous judgments, for example. Nobody will listen to self-righteous judgment. If we criticize someone with a tone of voice that suggests moral failures are her specialty, we might as well save our breath especially if we add the words I say this for your own good. Self-righteous judgments are both wrong and foolish. One reason they re foolish is that other people know enough to look who s talking. The problem here is famous, and we saw it during the White House scandal several years ago. The president of the United States disgraced the White House, but a lot of us Christians disgraced ourselves by mishandling the president s sin. How difficult it is to handle another person s sin with the necessary sorrow and humility. Sometimes we feel glad instead of sorry; sometimes we feel proud of ourselves instead of sorry. Isn t it satisfying, after all, to remind ourselves once again where sin is to be found? Why, it s over there other people s lives, not in our own. I say Jesus Christ rules out self-righteous judgments of this kind. Jesus hated selfrighteousness, which is why he was hard on the Pharisees. In one of his parables Jesus was extremely hard on the unmerciful servant. Jesus was hard on people who had been generously forgiven by God but who were stingy in their forgiveness of others. Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the sake of visual learners, Jesus adds a cartoon in Matthew 7: How can you spot the speck in your neighbor s eye when your own eyes are boarded up with two-by-fours? No self-righteous judgments. No hasty judgments either. No hasty judgments before we ve heard a person s story. Radio host Dr. Laura hears 30 seconds of a person s life, and she s got a judgment. It might even be a right judgment and I, for one, am glad of a few media types who are willing to talk about human accountability. But Dr. Laura has no time to hear a person s story and make a seasoned judgment, a considered judgment. The clock keeps ticking in big time radio, so Dr. Laura cuts people off and tells them what to do. Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Jesus wants to slow our judgments down. When we hear of AIDS spreading in sub-saharan Africa, we do have to get around at some point to making the very judgment Newsweek rejected. We do have to decide that what s lethal there is caused, in part, by wrong behavior. But if you see orphaned children and weeping widows and the glassy eyes and caved-in bodies of thousands of poverty-stricken human beings, moral judgment of other people s sex lives wouldn t be your first reaction, would it? First you would feel sorrow and compassion. When your own son or daughter, by his or her own folly, gets into big trouble, what s your first reaction? To point a finger? Or to open your arms? Do not judge excludes hasty judgments. There may be time for moral judgment later, after we have done the more urgent things, such as weeping and embracing and helping with medical care.

5 Finally, Jesus also rules out presumptuous judgments. Presumptuous judgments are one in which we presume to know what we actually do not know about another person. To avoid presumptuous judgments means that even though we must judge people s acts and even their character, we ought to be much slower to judge the degree to which people are accountable for their acts and character. Yes, the rule of thumb is that people are accountable, and it s a good rule because it treats people as moral grown-ups. But there s a good reason why the ultimate Judge is God. The reason is that we don t know other people s raw material. We don t always know how they are wired, how they were raised, and who humiliated them when they were 10. Let me repeat: our rule of thumb is to hold each other accountable because we then show each other proper respect as moral adults. But who knows the heart of another person? Only God knows, and God doesn t tell us maybe because we couldn t bear to know each other s hearts. We are stuck with speculations and rules of thumb. Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. That is, in the judging department, do to others as you would have them do to you. Judge, but do so humbly and slowly and with due regard for the poverty of your knowledge. Judge only in a way that you would like to be judged yourself. And leave the final judgment to God, who alone knows the human heart. I believe this is our Lord s message, and that you and I should take it to heart.