Do not judge... ok, I had thought I would work my way to this passage, going thru the sermon on the Mount as Wesley exposited it. But, this passage of Scripture is so wildly abused, that even though I think there is a lot to be said for following the progression of Wesley laying out the Sermon on the Mount, the time has come to deal decisively with the sad interpretations of this passage of Scripture.
The popular mind's gloss on this Scripture is a teenage paradise or a rapper's delight.
"No one can judge me."
"Only God can judge me."
"Christians aren't supposed to judge."
"Don't judge."
And the list goes on and on.
Can you judge someone for judging? Because that's what you're doing if you start whining that someone called out sin (see my post on Methodist Backbonehere
At the end of the day, the misuse of this Scripture is difficult to deal with because the bad interpretations present themselves as being deep and "spiritual." Deep and spiritual apparently means "dispensing with common sense and everything else Scripture has to say about this."
This is from Sermon 30, the tenth discourse on the Sermon on The Mount. And may I remind everybody, this constitutes Methodist doctrine. I know many want to think that being Methodist means we pick and choose from an awesome buffet, but no. You must eat your vegetables.
Wesley begins by telling us that in the fifth chapter of Matthew, our blessed Lord has carefully guarded true religion from the "glosses of men," [that is, those interpretations that make the Word of no effect], and has given us a picture of the interior formation the Holy Spirit does in us. In the sixth chapter, the Lord shows that the simplest things we can be made holy if we have a holy intention-- that is, when the heart is right [interior formation] the actions can be right. In the first part of chapter 7 He "points out the most fatal and common hindrances to this holiness."
The first caution is against judging.
"There is no station of life, nor any period of time, from the hour of our first repenting and believing the Gospel, till we are made perfect in love, wherein this caution is not needful for the child of God." There are just so many times we are tempted to judge, and we usually feel so justified. [let me intrude here: at least, I feel that I am usually justified! Judging and anger are such self-justifying sins!]
Here's where Wesley gets interesting. It seems that God has designed this command not so much for the children of God, but for the children of the world, for those who do not know God. If we were to go back and look at the interior formation explained in the first part of the Sermon on the Mount, we could see that indeed, if we were being blessed in meekness, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, etc., then this command to "judge not" is almost superfluous. But the children of the world who feel themselves convicted by the life of the serious Christian spend their time looking for the hypocrisy or faults of the ones seeking after God, in order to make excuses for themselves. It is to such a mindset that the Lord says they see the speck in another's eye, but not the log that is in their own. Wesley says the meaning is something like this: "You do not consider the damnable impenitence, the Satanic pride, the accursed self-will, the idolatrous love of the world, which are in you, and which make your whole life an abomination to the Lord." So what can such a person really have to say to the one he considers too zealous for God, who has gone to extremes of self-denial [fasting], and spends too much time in prayer or in hearing preaching?
Wesley then moves on to examining what judging means, what is the judging that is prohibited. He says it is not simply evil speaking, which is relating evil about an absent person. It's not simply thinking evil thoughts. But--and here is where we really need to pay attention-- Wesley says not all evil thinking is condemned. If you see someone commit robbery or murder, or hear them blaspheme the name of God, you can't help but thinking of evil of such a person. There is no sin in that. If it prompts you to warn them about the consequences of sin [what we most commonly resent when we start hollering about judging], it is in fact a compassionate thing to do.
To sum up:
we have to see clearly what do not judge means
It is nothing like what the world means by "not judging;" if people sin, we must speak up and condemn the acts and warn the sinner of the consequences. One day we'll post on a difficult sermon on a difficult scripture, "On the Duty of Reproving One's Neighbor."
Wesley has a lot more to say on this topic in this sermon; we'll get to that as we progress through the Sermon on The Mount. I wanted to post on this because as often as we hear stupid things like, "You can't judge me," we need to see what the Scriptures say.
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