The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

From Judging to Healing, Part One – Adjusting to Jesus’ Teaching:  Mt.7:1 – 6

^7:1 Do not judge so that you will not be judged. ² For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

         We come to that tricky section in Jesus’ teaching where he tells us to not judge other people, but participate in their healing.  Presumably this is because he has just given us a very radical teaching (Mt.5:21 – 6:34) and will continue to do so.  Whenever we start growing into a new awareness of ourselves and our ethical relationship to other people, we look back at the person we’ve been with a kind of regret.  We may feel a little ashamed of our past selves, even scornful.  We may feel grateful that Jesus has helped us mature or overcome a bad habit. 

         Part of that is natural.  We are selfish in the first two decades of our lives in ways that hopefully all of us will outgrow.  Since I am a parent and also work in campus ministry, I’m often reminded that the frontal lobe of the brain is not fully developed until about age 21, and that is the part of the brain that helps us process the consequences of our own decisions.  Also, young women are usually maturing emotionally at a faster rate than young men.  So how we relate to ethical issues, and how we relate to people who have different ethical postures, is a big question.

However, as we critique ourselves in light of Jesus’ heart for our growth, we intentionally or unintentionally judge other people too.  We may judge our parents for not handling anger that well and passing that onto us.  We may judge our peers for their attitudes about relations with the opposite gender, alcohol, keeping their word, or materialism.  And usually the thing we struggle with the most is what we keep a distance from, at least for a time.  It’s like when you start a diet; you sometimes have to tell yourself to actively dislike the foods you’re trying to avoid, so we think that when Jesus calls us away from a certain lifestyle, we play a mental game with ourselves to try to resist the lifestyle that you still find so enticing.  (If you’ve changed your behavior more out of a sense of people pleasing – to impress your Christian friends – rather than out of a real conviction with Jesus, you especially try to play mental games with yourself.  But I don’t think that’s the best motivation, nor a healthy internal posture.)  That’s why some people who still participate in that thing may feel judged.  How do we handle that?  I hope the following few reflections will be helpful in addressing this very important issue.

Part of the reason we judge other people is because we are so used to ethical standards that draw a line in the sand and say whether a person is above or below that standard.  If you haven’t committed X, or don’t usually do Y, or haven’t done Z in a while, then you’re okay.  We learn that as young children.  If you obeyed mom and dad’s rules, then you are a good child.  You may have formed superiority or inferiority complexes at different times with your siblings based on ‘how you did.’  But as you grew up, you learned something.  You learned you can trust people who hold certain standards and live at them.  So you internalized some of those standards.  Ethical standards like that help you organize your world and the people in it.  So, when we take Jesus seriously, we first tend to think that we must now live by his ‘ethical standards.’

Now if I take Jesus’ teaching to other people without truly seeing myself as addressed by his word, then I will start using it as a heavy club to pound other people’s heads with.  This happens whenever wounded people try to leverage Jesus’ teaching against others, to satisfy their pain and loneliness.  They expect things of other people – their new Christian friends or their non-Christian parents – and think that Jesus’ teaching gives them license to do that.  They develop a judgmental attitude.

But if you notice, Jesus shoots far above having ‘ethical standards.’  My goodness!  Who else says to us, ‘Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect’?!?  Jesus delves into the deepest, most problematic spiritual realities inside us.  He reveals our hearts’ need for his healing power and transformation.  And he calls us to struggle with ourselves in such a way that we are never ‘done.’  We will never ‘arrive’ this side of being physically resurrected with him.  On some level, in Christian fellowship and in civic society, baseline standards do exist for how we treat people and ourselves.  There are agreements and qualifications for Christian leadership in a fellowship or church, for example (e.g. 1 Timothy 3; Titus 1).  But Jesus’ full ‘morality’ or ‘ethical standards’ (if you call them that) are so far beyond us that we cannot find our identity in whether we have lived up to any standard or not.  Instead, we need a new paradigm.  Our identity can only be relational, not moral.  That is, we must find our identity simply ‘in Jesus,’ in relation to him because he loves us and others, not ‘in our ethical performance.’  Then, we have to switch from drawing lines in the sand to separate people, so to speak, to following an arrow expressing a direction.  We are all on a journey of healing and growth with Jesus, heading in a particular and known direction, as we are opening ourselves up to him more and more, to express more of Jesus’ life and character.  That has a direct impact on how we speak to others about Jesus’ invitation to them to let him heal them.