You see something in a friend's lifestyle that bothers you, but you hesitate to mention it. You are unsettled by the way a certain matter is being handled at work but you find yourself leery to speak up. You are in a situation where you deem a joke someone just told to be inappropriate, yet you keep silent. And often in such scenarios what checks your tongue or causes you to hesitate is that haunting verse, "Judge not lest ye be judged!"

We've all had this line from Jesus quoted to us at one time or another. It's a favorite text of even non-Christians who delight in turning the tables on us Christians by putting Jesus in their service against us. A Christian holds up a sign protesting something, and someone else on the other side of the street holds up a placard bearing the words, "Judge not!" Of course, even so we do not cease from all our judging. Still, even when we do speak words of rebuke or criticism, we remain so aware of Matthew 7:1 that we preface our comments by saying, "Well, I know we're not supposed to judge, but . . . ."

Because it is such a clear, seemingly straightforward word from Jesus, Matthew 7:1 is indeed often used as a conversation stopper. But this evening, as we return to our look at the Sermon on the Mount, we will see that there are some surprising wrinkles in the larger context of Matthew 7--wrinkles that remind us once again of just how dicey discipleship can be. In truth, this matter of judging or not judging is vastly more complex than most people realize when they so quickly quote that line about not judging.

To begin, simply note with me a few elements of this passage which make clear that in Matthew 7, curiously enough, Jesus decidedly does not intend to put an end to the making of judgments. After all this passage concludes with Jesus mentioning that there are some people who are not worthy of our time because they are the human equivalent of thoughtless pigs and nasty dogs. I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like a pretty powerful judgment on those people!

But even before you get to that part of the passage, there is also something in those well-known verses 3-5 that can alert you to the fact that judging is something Jesus expects will take place among his followers. We all know that Jesus paints here a hyperbolic, very humorous word picture in order to make his point as vividly as possible.

Picture two workers in a lumber mill: let's call them Larry and Mo. Mo is cutting up oak trees into two-by-fours when suddenly a gust of wind blows some sawdust into his eyes. And so Mo is blinking back tears from the irritation this is causing. Larry, however, has somehow managed to get an entire two-by-four lodged in his eyeball! He's clearly got a big problem and yet he's paying no attention to it--instead he keeps trying to come up to Mo, telling him over and again how bad sawdust is for your eyes. Problem is, every time Larry comes up to help Mo, he about knocks Mo's block off with the plank he's swinging around out of his eye socket! (By the way, Jesus' vignette really is ridiculous enough to invoke a couple of stooges to illustrate it!)

The point is obvious: when you've got major problems that need tending in your own life, you've no business arrogantly going around and criticizing those with vastly less serious problems. But even here notice something: Jesus still says that once you have taken care of the plank in your own eye, then you can and must tend to the sawdust in the other person's eye. Verses 3-5, therefore, are not saying there should be no judgments within the Christian community, only that the judgments we render must be done in the right way.

And by the way, notice something else: Jesus does not say that if you have sawdust in your eye you have no business helping the person with a plank in her eye. If your problem is only sawdust, by all means assist those whom you judge to have larger problems! In other words, Jesus is not saying that before we may render judgments about who needs help we need to be fully free from sins in our own lives. If that were the necessary pre-condition for helping one another overcome sins, such help would obviously never take place.

Yet Jesus indicates that we are to judge. Whether the problem is a plank or some sawdust, helping people in such difficulties requires first that we judge and assess the fact of the problem. Also, Jesus says that we are to judge that certain people are pigs and dogs and so we avoid them for that reason. You see, as it turns out, Matthew 7 does not say that all drawing of discerning judgments must cease. It says that when we make such judgments, we need to be very careful in how we're doing it.

But if that is so, then what are we to make of verse 1 and its clear words about flat out not judging lest we also be judged? Let's spend the balance of this message trying to understand this famous saying of Jesus in the light of the fact that the rest of this passage does indeed tell us that discerning judgments are still necessary for disciples.

In general, this part of the Sermon on the Mount looks very similar to wisdom passages such as Proverbs. As we've noted before, if you were to read the entire Book of Proverbs in one sitting, you would notice that here and there you can find proverbs that contradict one another. In one place you may be told that "A soft answer turns away wrath," while in another part of the same book you may find the admonition to rebuke a fool harshly for his folly. If you're one of those people who insists on a straightforward, literalist interpretation of every single verse in the Bible, such contradictions are unsettling.

But what lies behind such a phenomenon is the larger biblical truth that it takes wisdom to apply wisdom. To be a wise follower of God requires paying attention to and juggling a number of different factors all at once. There is a time to answer softly and a time to rebuke sternly--wisdom discerns the difference and responds appropriately. In the case of Matthew 7 there appears to be a wrong way of judging and a right way of judging. Our job is to figure out which is which.

Allow me to suggest three things to keep in mind, and we will consider each separately. First, Jesus is ruling out our making any final condemning judgments of any person--it is not our place to consign someone to hell. Second, Jesus may also be saying that we are not to blaze forth into society like holy crusaders or warriors, enforcing our judgments about sin onto others. Third and above all, Jesus is saying that any discerning or judging that we do must be done in humility and with an abiding, overriding sense of God's grace in our own lives.

Now let's consider each of these in turn. The first point we can deal with very quickly: final judgment belongs to God alone. In our limited perspectives we will never know enough about any other person to be in a position to speak a damning word to them. That may be true about any individual deed a person commits and it is certainly true about the whole sweep and sum of a person's life.

We cannot witness someone's saying or doing something and then conclude, "Well, that's it! You committed adultery, you got an abortion, you committed a homosexual act, you killed someone when you were drunk, you spoke an unholy thing about God: you're done for. You can't ever be forgiven. That deed, that word, that sin will have the last word on your life!" Even if we are correct to judge a certain act or lifestyle as sinful, that is still different than judging an entire person finally and utterly.

In German there is a nice distinction which some commentators have made use of. In German there is a difference between Verurteilung and Beurteilung. Verurteilung is a final damnation of someone, Beurteilung is a simple judgment on right and wrong. According to Jesus the discernment of Beurteilung--of assessing right and wrong--will be a daily part of life but Verurteilung--final and lasting damnation--must not be. (By the way, this may dovetail with our sermon from this morning: even when it comes to people from other religions, perhaps a little holy agnosticism is called for when it comes to leaving the final judgment up to God alone. There is a big difference between judging that a Jewish person's ideas about Jesus are wrong and saying this means all Jews are damned.)

A second possible way to construe Jesus' words in Matthew 7:1 ties in with the Old Testament tradition, and so may require a bit more explaining. But in the Old Testament the Judges--people like Samson, Deborah, Ehud--were champions, heroes, warriors, and crusaders who sallied forth to press God's claims on Israel, violently so if necessary. Some biblical commentators believe that among the things Jesus is saying in Matthew 7 is the idea that disciples are not to be judges in that sense.

A little later in Matthew 13 Jesus will tell the parable of the Wheat and the Tares. There Jesus makes clear that for now we disciples are not supposed to go around uprooting and casting into the fire those whom we would consider to be sinful weeds growing in God's creation. For now, Jesus says, we are to accept the fact that the good mingles with the bad in this world, weeds grow right next to even the nicest stalks of wheat. But just let it be that way for now, Jesus says, and God will sort it all out later. That parable is found only in Matthew's gospel and it's possible that Matthew 7:1 is a preview of it.

Keep in mind that Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience and so may have felt more compelled than the other gospel writers to make clear that the situation in the church for disciples is going to be different than the situation in Israel long ago. And that, by the way, is why we should be uncomfortable when we read someone like James Dobson and others defending their use of hot, holy war rhetoric by reeling off a long list of only Old Testament passages from the Book of Judges and the like. Jesus says that one of the features to life that makes discipleship dicey is that though we make many discerning judgments on what's wrong with the world, we do not behave like hot-blooded warriors in rooting it all out.

But thirdly, and weaving in and through these first two points, is the overarching call for humility and an awareness of grace. In Matthew 6, right after giving what we now call the Lord's Prayer, Jesus says that if you cannot forgive other people, then you won't be forgiven by God, either. As we've said on other occasions, that does not mean we have to earn our salvation after all, as though Jesus were saying, "First you go out and forgive some folks and then I'll reward you by forgiving you myself."

No, instead what Jesus says is that those who already have been forgiven by grace alone will be so bowled over by grace they will be only too happy to spread it around to others. But if you don't do that, if you go around in life nursing every grudge you can, then maybe that is a sign that you, as a matter of fact, have not received and so do not appreciate God's grace after all.

Verse 2's words about judging with the right measure and verses 3-5 about first attending to your own serious problems are all saying the same thing. Yes, we do judge when a friend errs and sins, we do recognize that certain lifestyle patterns are out of sync with God's kingdom. But the question then becomes: how do we approach the people who have these difficulties?

Well, if you live with a constant awareness of grace's daily operation in your own life, then you will not come to a fellow Christian with some high-falootin', finger-wagging, holier-than-thou, "I've never committed a sin a day in my life" kind of approach! Rather you will come gently and graciously in the ardent hope that the same liberating, joy-giving grace you experience every day will come to this other person, too.

In short, we are not to give up on justice in our wider world, we are not to give up on making moral judgments within the community. But we do our rebuking, we press the cause of God's justice as disciples not as warriors or arrogant Pharisees. If we approach people with planks or sawdust in their eyes this way, not only will our approach be that much more likely to succeed, more importantly we will then incarnate the gospel. We will then become walking, talking showcase display windows of grace.

But even so our attempts at helping the world or each other will not always work and that, then, leads to the final part of the passage: the matter of those whom even Jesus designates as pigs and dogs. For Jesus knows as do we all that even with the right approach, even with grace and graciousness, even with our avoiding final judgments of damnation, there will be those who won't listen to us, who will take the very best we have to offer and throw it right back in our faces. And when you meet up with people such as these, Jesus says, walk away. Leave them alone and leave them to God.

Of course, the first thing to check when someone rejects your rebuke or warning is to see if the problem lies with you. But if not, if we honestly determine we've done it right in grace and truth, then we just leave such prickly people to their own devices.

It's an odd thing to do, of course. Few things feel less Christian than turning away from someone, refusing to try yet again to be kind, nice, generous, forgiving. But when you know that you'll be snubbed again, that your words will not be believed and your grace not received, when you know that in the end you'll just be torn once again to pieces, then Jesus says to leave such surly folks be and hope that a day will come when God's Spirit, who can do far more than we ever could, will shake them up and change them.

It seems like ever since the O.J. Simpson trial the whole business of judging and justice has become something of an obsession with folks, even an entertaining repast. In the last several years a number of "People's Court" knock-offs have been spawned on TV along with other shows on CNN in which legal experts like Greta VanSustern--who became famous by offering commentary during the Simpson trial--spend hours each week re-hashing the goings-on in high profile court cases.

In a society of drive-by shootings, drug dealing teenagers, philandering politicians, and fist-pumping, finger-flipping motorists on the highways, people seem hungry to see a little justice in action, to be re-assured that at least sometimes what goes around comes around. And so we Americans are spending more and more time lounging around watching others render various judgments.

Jesus would no doubt agree that justice is important--very important. Justice and Righteousness are the very foundations of his throne as the Lord of lords. Justice is important, but Matthew 7 makes clear that so is grace, so is humility, so is honesty. We can't help anyone and we'll not bring any justice to the world or to each other unless we do so as disciples--disciples saved by grace and living each moment of each day off the riches of that abiding grace that has set up shop and taken up residence in our very hearts.

Amen.