Luke 6:36-38
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 20 June 2021
I give it to you literally:
Become merciful, just as your Father is merciful. And do not judge (that is, do not be continually judging), and you will not be judged. And do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you—good measure, pressed down, shaken, overflowing, will be given into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will be measured back to you.
I often think of a journey I took from Johannesburg to Cape Town. I had gathered three or four newspapers in the departure lounge; I like to read when I am flying. I also like to be last on board, so I had hung back. My seat was in the very back row on the righthand side, so I entered at the back of the plane. Everyone else was seated. It must have been winter because I had a big coat on. There were newspapers hanging out of three pockets. The window seat was occupied by a young woman; the seat between us was empty. I was unloading stuff I thought I might need when she spoke to me: “Would you mind if I read one of those newspapers; you seem to have enough.” I grunted and drew one from the inside pocket of my coat. Eventually I got my coat off and sat down. I stowed some bits and pieces, including my Bible in the magazine pouch in front of me; I also like to read my Bible when I travel. “Is that a Bible?” she asked. She had a voice that carried; a few heads turned. “Yes, it is, I said. “Oh good,” she said, “then I’ll be safe.” I murmured assent, then, beginning to get the measure of this woman, corrected myself and said, “But I am 65 and perhaps the Lord may want to take me home.” She squealed, and most everyone around was paying attention. “But I’m only young.” That was the beginning of an interesting flight. I didn’t register the take-off, and only the bump reminded me we had been in the air for two hours were now in Cape Town. To tell the whole story would take me that long, because we talked all the way. At one point the chap in front appeared over the top of the seat and asked if he could listen in. We were discussing mixed marriages and that concerned him. Adelaide—I will call her that—was Jewish, and going out with a Dutch Reformed boy.
At some point I must have mentioned judgement because she exclaimed, again in that piercing voice: “My God would never judge anyone.” I remember thinking she must never have read her own Bible. No one can read the Old Testament and be in any doubt that God judges. From the Garden of Eden to the Exile in Babylon, to the warnings in Malachi, the story of her nation is a story of many judgements. At the time of Jesus, they were conscious that although some of had returned from the exile, most continued to live scattered in foreign lands, and even those at home were mostly ruled by occupying powers. God’s displeasure was felt—in the loss of their kings, foreign occupation, taxation, corruption, poverty, sickness, demon possession, and death. Judgement was something you could feel.
Justice is far from us … We look for light, but all is darkness … Like the blind we grope along the wall … Among the strong we are like the dead … Our offences are many in your sight, and our sins testify against us … rebellion and treachery against the Lord … (Isaiah 59)
I don’t think you can get away from it: we will all be judged. This universe didn’t come from nowhere; someone much more intelligent and righteous than us made it all, and I don’t believe that in the end he won’t sort us out. There was an old comedy item: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore discussing God. “I tell you Dud, what if we get to heaven and a Buddhist guy meets us and says, ‘Ha, ha, ha; get out! we were right and you were wrong.” Even if we are wrong, we will find out. We will all of us be judged. But we are not wrong about God. An Indian priest I went to work with in the 70’s told me his church was often visited by hippies. “If I ever hear you say, ‘Well, we’re all looking for the truth,” you can leave. “They are looking for the truth. We have the truth.” We do, and it is clear from one end of God’s word to the other that we will be judged; we have been judged, and we are being judged. Gosh, these days we hate to even think that God might judge us, and yet we are the most judgemental generation in all of human history.
This is a strange way to start a sermon on “Do not Judge.” But we need to get the background right. God sent Jesus to a nation who knew they were under judgement to say it was all over. “Peace;” that was Jesus’ message. “Peace with God. The war is over.” He travelled all over the land proclaiming amnesty, forgiveness, and the end of suffering, for all who would return to God.
Only when you understand this, will you appreciate what Jesus is on about in the Sermon on the Mount. He is instructing people how to be his followers if they want to join his mission. “Be merciful, for your Father is merciful.” God was on a mercy mission.
Imagine what it was like for those disciples! They weren’t people with power, who needed to be merciful to the powerless. It was the other way around. They were the powerless ones. I remember talking to a young Palestinian in a Muslim cemetery below Jerusalem’s Golden Gate. He told me it was prophesied there would be four wars—there had already been three—in the fourth the Jews would be thrown back into the sea. He was full of hatred, full of judgement and condemnation, and you can understand why. That was just how it was with the Jews at the time of Jesus, only then they were the underdogs, and their hatred was directed at their Roman overlords. When Jesus told them to be merciful he must have been aiming at their thoughts and feelings. But the Romans were not his first concern, because the Jews had split into parties and were also full of hatred towards each other. A psychiatrist lectured recently at Yale University. She told her audience: “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person who got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world an f….ing favour.” I guess that’s how Jews felt then. Our newspapers are full of hatred towards anyone strong or with authority. It was to this kind of hater that Jesus said, “Be merciful.” That has to mean, “Stop regarding others in this hostile way! Adopt a whole different approach. We are on a mercy mission; we cannot go to them full of resentments and thoughts about what we would like to happen to them.” This is why, after addressing the special case of judging, he goes on to say:
Give and it will be given to you—good measure, pressed down, shaken, overflowing, will be given into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will be measured back to you.
God is never miserly in what he gives to us—in this world and in the world to come. Still, I don’t have to tell you this attitude is difficult, maybe even impossible without God’s help—especially to enemies, though it is easier when we understand why we are doing it.
Step one is learning not to judge. Christians have a bad name for this. It’s true we have a particular problem here. We believe in right and wrong. We believe in judgement. We have the law of God to guide us, and all the teachings of the Scriptures. We try to conform our lives to them. So, it is natural that in our thoughts we are going to judge people who flout God’s laws. It is hard to be warm towards someone you are inwardly judging.
But we should stop to consider whether we have not been overtaken in this. There was a time when Christians debated whether we should impose our morality on people who didn’t share our faith. “That’s your view, but not everyone holds that view.” That’s how we were silenced again and again. We backed off, and very soon lost our voice in public moral discussions. But everyone else continued to push their ideas of right and wrong, and now we find ourselves with a culture of political correctness, where, if you step out of line, you will be judged, regardless of your views. Judgement is the stock and trade of people who think they can bring in a new and better world, if only their rules are followed, and there are no dissenting voices. “Cancel culture” uses social media to wage war against someone’s reputation or memory to destroy their influence and silence their voice. The campaign against Margaret Court is a case in point. Her church continues to teach that sodomy is a sin, as does ours. Cancel culture seeks to have her ostracized. It was the same with Israel Folau. My college in South Africa is named after George Whitefield. His orphanage in Georgia owned slaves. No matter that he lived 250 years ago in a very different world, and that his preaching brought millions to Christianity in Great Britain and America—it is estimated that four people out of five in the American colonies listened to his preaching; he changed the course of American and British history. Yet for his one sin he is to be cancelled and removed from our memories. I mention this to alert you to the fact that in the wider society it is not Christians who are making the judgements and creating guilt; and the cruelty of the judgements being made, not by courts, but by Woke campaigners through the social media can be very cruel. People are losing their businesses, jobs, websites, losing their ability to express their opinions. I hope Christians never go in for that.
I have already said that Jesus was on a peace mission—through his disciples he still is. God is forgiving sins. That is the first and greatest reason why those engaged in Jesus’ mission should not judge others. I take it that is why, when Jesus sent out the disciples on their own mission, that he told them they should say “Peace be upon this house,” when anyone offered to take them in. “Eat what is put before you!” he said—difficult for a Jew who was used to making judgements about what food was kosher and what would render them unclean. In Acts 2 Luke describes the explosion of joy that took place in the early church when they ignored their former scruples and opened their homes to one another without judging. So, should we boycott a business because it is owned by Muslims? No, we should shop there and try to befriend them.
But there is more to not judging than the realization that we are in the midst of a time of grace. Apart from the forgiveness that is given to us through Jesus, we are all alike guilty before God. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” says St Paul. “We are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in King Jesus.” Our sins may be different from those of another person, but apart from what Jesus has won for us through his death on the cross, we have no more right to raise our head in the presence of God than anyone. Christians must always approach others in the knowledge that we were once disqualified criminals. We were restored to friendship with God not through any virtue of our own, but by his sheer mercy. And we continue to sin, and continue to be forgiven.
It is difficult when we are dealing with someone who may be doing something we have never been guilty of. This guy is sleeping with another man. It may shock us. We have never done anything like that, nor even been tempted to it. But think carefully! Have you never had problems with sexual temptation. Have you never slept with someone outside of marriage, or fantasized it? That is why Paul can say we are all guilty of the same things we judge in others. The first lesson of Christian ministry is you never stand above the person you are helping; we are all alike disqualified (cancelled) wrongdoers, whom God in his mercy has owned and is rebuilding.
This is different from judging and teaching what is right and what is wrong. This we must do, if we would live in God’s way. But it leads us to a third reason we must be very careful of our judgements. Our judgements can so easily be wrong. “Shall the blind lead the blind?” Jesus says. He is talking to us, his disciples, though what he says is true of everyone. What we read in Luke is, of course, a summary of his teaching. People did not listen to him for hours to hear him pronounce a one-liner like this, and move on to the next one. I would be pretty sure that he told a story. A beggar sits by the roadside. It has been a long hot day and it is time to go home. But that is not easy when you are blind. The person who was supposed to come and lead him home hasn’t turned up yet and he’s becoming impatient. A passer-by asks him what is the matter. “No one has come to take me home,” he says. “Friend, let me take you home!” He jumps up and eagerly takes the outstretched hand; they set our together. What the beggar doesn’t know is that the friendly passer-by is also blind. Judging from some of his parables, Jesus was a great mime-artist. At this point he has the two of them wandering about running into obstacles, and stumbling into ditches. His audience is laughing uncontrollably.
The point is clear and would never have been forgotten: we are as much in need of a guide as those we criticize and want to correct or cancel. Jesus urges us to become true disciples, to learn from him, before we think we can guide others.
His next one-liner is also the summary of something much more dramatic. You’re in pain. You are standing there trying to blink a speck of sawdust out of your eye. It hurts. A friend offers to help. “Here, let me fish that speck from your eye!” You are glad for the assistance. He starts to poke around in your eye. You can’t see that he has a length of timber in his own eye. Jesus has picked up a lump of wood from the ground.
The point is this: none of us is competent to judge another, or easily able to guide others. Our judgements are distorted.
Still, sometimes you have to judge. And how do you decide when you should and when you shouldn’t? I was sent to look after a small church. It was the first church I had led. No one told me there had just been a scandal. A man in the congregation had left his wife and was had moved in with the organist. They continued to come to church. His wife, and her husband were also members of the church. The congregation was told they should not judge—they should be more loving. The church was split, and many left. I visited one mother who said she couldn’t see it was right that the church was telling them to accept, what they were teaching their children was unacceptable. She was quite right. Jesus taught that someone who persists in scandalous behaviour should be excluded from the church fellowship until they repent. I had to tell them they couldn’t come to Communion while they were living in sin. Of course, I knew I too was living in sin—in all sorts of ways—but public defiance of God’s laws has to be dealt with. A church without discipline will suffer shipwreck.
Let me sum up! Knowing we live in a time when God is drawing sinners to himself and forgiving our sins, is one principle. Knowing how far short we fall ourselves, is a second. Understanding that we need God’s guidance ourselves before we think to give guidance to another is a third. And there are others. I am conscious that I have only begun to open up a big and important issue.
I leave you with Jesus word’s in Luke 6:40:
A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.
We do not follow our own pet ideas, we do not follow a teacher, or guru, or school of thought, or philosophy; nor do we follow the Church. It is King Jesus we follow. We should take him as our teacher and learn from him. Only then will we learn to make good judgements. Making judgements is one of the most difficult and important of human responsibilities. We will all need to do it. Only as we learn from Jesus will our critical faculties be trained. More and more we will speak the truth in love, and learn to regard ourselves and others, also in truth and love.