Attitude
But there is something in this text about life today that transcends the one sent on mission. Jesus is probing into the heart of his followers to ask them if they value life more than kingdom and righteousness. Perhaps the best way to think about this is that Jesus doesn’t call us to be care-less about provisions but to be care-free. Some folks find in this text an opportunity to be lazy, or an opportunity to give away everything in a reckless or unwise manner. Jesus isn’t encouraging his disciples to be reckless. Instead, he’s calling them to follow him and to see that following him, or (in our text) seeking first the kingdom and righteousness, reshapes what we value most.
Money matters; without it we can’t do most things that a capitalist world requires. Provisions matter; without food or drink or clothing we don’t survive. But “matter” is not the same as “worship.” Our central ache or yearning or seeking is to be for God, for God’s kingdom, and for God’s righteousness. Those things do “matter,” but the kingdom matters even more.
Ron Sider asked the question of what is the secret to a carefree existence that lives out what Jesus teaches here.22 It begins, he wrote, when we really do believe and live out that God, the God of all, is our loving, creating, sustaining Father. Then he urged us to see that we are called to live under Jesus as our Lord. But he knew that such a life meant sacrifice and not just a mental attitude toward things: the summons not to be anxious was a summons both to trust and to entrust a life of solidarity with others, from our church to global needs, to the caring Father. This is where Sider makes one of his most famous comments ever: “What 99 percent of North Americans need to hear 99 percent of the time is this: ‘Give to everyone who begs from you,’ and ‘sell your possessions.’ ”
This is real. It gets ordinary. Every day. I was speaking at Fuller Theological Seminary in their chapel, and I spoke on the “Parable from Hell” (Luke 16:19–31). The point of my talk was that we want to know who will go to heaven and how long hell will last, but Jesus used hell language not to satisfy our curiosity but to urge us to see the Lazaruses at our gate. When I was done, Kara Powell, a wonderful professor at Fuller, and I had coffee. On our way to the local coffee shop she told me how her daughter had become wonderfully sensitive to the poor. As a result, they all had some McDonald’s coupons with them so if they saw someone in need they could help.
Then it happened. As Kara and I left the coffee shop to sit outside to chat, a beggar asked for something. Kara, knowing that beggar’s style, sat down, and we chatted. On our way back to Fuller the man was still there, and she said words I will not forget: “Hi, I’m Kara. What’s your name? I’d like to help you with these two coupons. Will you use this to buy some food?” It is easier to walk by than to help. It is easier to save than to give. The disciple of Jesus is called to see those in need and do something about it. It begins when we ask their name. Kara illustrated for me what it means to relax our grip on securing our provisions and to live a carefree existence of following Jesus into kingdom conditions.
The Birds, Our Teachers
John Stott was not only one of the finest Christian leaders and expositors of the Bible in the twentieth century, but he was also a rabid bird-watcher and photographer. All those years of watching birds led him to see all sorts of lessons about life in the birds. In his book The Birds Our Teachers, Stott found eleven lessons about life:
From the ravens, we learn faith.
From the migration of storks, repentance.
From the head of owls, facing both ways.
From the value of sparrows, self-esteem.
From the drinking of pigeons, gratitude.
From the metabolism of hummingbirds, work.
From the soaring of eagles, freedom.
From the territory of (English) robins, space.
From the wings of a hen, shelter.
From the song of larks, joy.
From the breeding cycle of all birds, love.
This will be perhaps enough concrete detail to trigger your own thinking about birds, but let me add two. From a neighbor’s blue parakeet, a story I tell in my book The Blue Parakeet,23 I learned the fastidious and nervous habits of our sparrows and how it took time for them to welcome a stranger. And from a male mallard on a roadside one day who had just lost his bride when a car struck her, I saw commitment. The male had put himself in serious jeopardy to care for his “wife” as she expired.
Indeed, the birds can be our teachers. One can peer into the hand of God in this world as well by examining flowers (and we are fond of decorative grasses, mums, and the varieties of perennials we plant), as did Jesus, but what he calls us to do here is not so much to be bird-watchers or gardeners but to be sensitive enough to stop and listen and see the hand of God at work in this world, and from that to learn that God is a loving Father who cares for us.
Notes
1. KNT: “fifteen inches to your height.”
2. KNT: “finery.”
3. KNT: “on the bonfire tomorrow.”
4. KNT: “make your top priority God’s kingdom and his way of life.”
5. KNT: “One day’s trouble at a time is quite enough.”
6. Matthew 6:25–34 is more or less found in the parallel at Luke 12:22–31, except Matt 6:34 has no parallel.
7. It is used positively, as in “cares for,” in 1 Cor 7:32–34; 12:25; Phil 2:20.
8. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 369.
9. A. Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 14.
10. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 370.
11. Luke has “ravens” (korakas), an unclean bird (Lev 11:15; Deut 14:14). Matthew has the more general term for “birds” (peteina). On learning from the birds, see J. R. W. Stott, The Birds Our Teachers: Essays in Orni-Theology (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1999).
12. The word for “hour” (πῆχυν) is thought by some to mean adding height to one’s stature; the evidence supports a reference to time, hence “hour.” See Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:652–53.
13. ACCS: Matthew, 145.
14. I learned this in college from my Greek professor and have no idea of its source.
15. Matthew normally has “kingdom of heaven/s” but here has kingdom “of God,” something he has five times. On this subject see Pennington, Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew. Pennington contends that “heaven” and “heavenly” are not reverential circumlocutions but instead a kind of rhetorical counterforce: heaven stands over against earth.
16. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 204.
17. Willard, Renovation of the Heart, 85–91.
18. McKnight, King Jesus Gospel, 146–60.
19. Luz, Matthew 1–7, 341.
20. France, Matthew, 266.
21. Edith Schaeffer, L’Abri (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1992).
22. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, 102–5. Quotations are from this section.
23. McKnight, Blue Parakeet, 22–25.
Chapter 17
Matthew 7:1–5
LISTEN to the Story
1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s [TNIV: ‘someone else’s’] eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4How can you say to your brother [TNIV: omits ‘to your brother’], ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s [TNIV: ‘the other person’s’] eye.”
Listening to the text in the Story: Judges; 2 Samuel 12:1–5; Matthew 18:23–35; Romans 2:1; James 2:13; 4:11–12; 5:9.
The tension of this text is unavoidable. From Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 God issues one command after another. On top of those commands are prophetic evaluations
of the sins of the people who failed to live responsibly within the terms of the covenant God had made with humans. In other words, we who seek to indwell the Bible’s Story are indwelling the omniscient perspective of the divine’s narration. When we read, say, Judges, Zechariah, the gospel of Luke, Acts, 2 Corinthians, 1 John, or Revelation, we are led to hear what God thinks of what humans are doing. It is impossible for us to indwell this Story and not assume that narrative’s perspective. Again, that perspective is God’s perspective. It is not our perspective; it is God’s perspective. It is God’s perspective on us, not our perspective on others.
Bible readers, especially pastors (and commenters on blogs), inevitably begin to think like God about ourselves and others. Mark Allan Powell discovered that pastors and preachers tend to identify with Jesus (and God) when they read the Bible, while lay folks almost always identify with characters in the text instead of with Jesus or God.1 So perhaps the primary readers of this book—pastors, teachers—will need to be reminded that the danger I have been speaking about here is a pastoral and didactic posture rather than the posture of laypeople. Those most familiar with the Bible are tempted to think they are God!
Perhaps so, and even if not, standing in for God was a problem for those whom Jesus is addressing. It is likely that Bible readers, because they absorb God’s perspective in Bible reading, will become judges. In spite of the strong warnings in the Bible about not being judges, we often find ourselves judging others. So we need to hear what James 4:11–12 says to us:
Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?
This text (and we should not forget Romans 14 as a similar text) provides an early window into what Jesus was getting at when he said, “Do not judge.” James warns his readers that when they begin to judge (condemn) others, they are assuming the posture of God, not the posture of humans. In assuming that posture, they have usurped the role of God and begun to be the ones who determine what is right and wrong, and who is right and who is wrong.
Once again: it is nearly impossible for most Bible readers not to enter into the divine perspective of the narrative of the Bible. Yet, and here is the point, learning to enter into that Story’s perspective does not make us God, as David himself had to learn (2 Sam 12:1–5). We may know what God thinks, but we are not God. Instead, we need to hear from God and to be responsive to and responsible for that perspective in our world.
This leads to what might be the cutting edge of learning how to read this passage most accurately: we must learn to distinguish moral discernment from personal condemnation.2 This distinction—the ability to know what is good from what is bad and to be able to discern the difference versus the posture of condemning another person—enables us to see what Jesus prohibits in this passage. The flipside of this posture of condemnation is love, humility, mercy, and forgiveness (see 18:23–35). In other words, a Jesus Creed–driven disciple does not sit in judgment but acts with mercy toward others. John Wesley said this well: “The judging that Jesus condemns here is thinking about another person in a way that is contrary to love.”3
But there is more here than a Jesus version of “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his sandals.” The Sermon on the Mount frames a kingdom ethic, an Ethic from Beyond. In Israel’s history there were judges (who unfolded into kings and justices), but in the kingdom of God, God alone is Judge; human judges will not be needed because kingdom citizens live under the Messiah King and do the will of God. Jesus’ disciples are being summoned to live in that kind of world among themselves as they seek to embody in the here and now that future kingdom. Instead of a society marked by condemnation, they are to form a society marked by humility, love for neighbor and enemy, and mutual reconciliation.
EXPLAIN the Story
Our section’s central theme in 7:1 is expressed as a prohibition-with-warning, and everything that follows grounds and elucidates that single prohibition: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” In moving to 7:2 we find verse 1 slightly extended since it more or less repeats what we find there. Then in 7:3–4 Jesus interrogates his followers by revealing that they deconstruct themselves in judging others. Jesus closes with his kingdom alternative: take care of yourself first (7:5).
Prohibition with Warning (7:1)
Everything in our passage depends on defining the term “judge” (krinō), but unfortunately, that word doesn’t help us because it is sufficiently expansive to cover moral discernment (knowing good from bad; cf. Luke 12:57; John 7:24; Acts 4:19), lawsuits (Matt 5:40; John 7:51), governmental direction (Matt19:28), and final damnation by God (Luke 19:22; John 3:17–18; 5:22; 12:48). The difficulty is determining which is in mind, and we get nowhere if we don’t admit that Jesus rendered strong moral judgment of others (Matt 6:1–18; 7:13–27) and that he compelled his disciples to know the difference between what is good and what is bad—in fact, the whole Sermon is just that.
Within the spectrum of the term krinō there is something prohibited. It makes most sense to interpret that as assuming the posture of God in condemning a person. If so, 7:1 is not a prohibition of rendering judgment or discernment about good and bad. Perhaps we can simplify it to this: we are to conclude “that is wrong” and “that is good,” but we must not pronounce “you are condemned by God.” The Ethic from Beyond shapes a society for reconciliation instead of damnation. Kingdom people are called to love, not to act the part of God. Thus, judging others “is the forbidden evaluation of other persons. It corrodes simple love.”4
Hence, I suggest the best translation—in context—is: “Do not condemn or you too will be condemned [by God at the judgment].”5 Without this nuanced difference between discernment and condemnation, we run the risk of (1) becoming mute on moral judgment or (2) missing the powerful warning about assuming we are God.
Extension (7:2)
This verse both repeats and slightly extends what is found in the prohibition of verse 1. Two words are now used: “judge” and “measure,” and they are to be synthesized because they are typical Jewish parallelism (saying one thing with two words). The standard that the condemner uses will be the standard God uses against the condemner; this was found elsewhere in the Jewish world (e.g., Rom 2:1, 3).6 Since no human lives up to his or her own standard, that standard deconstructs a human’s attempt to play God with others. God will be the final judge because God alone is the Judge (cf. Rom 14:10; 1 Cor 4:5; Jas 4:11–12).
Interrogation (7:3–4)
Jesus creates an image that is both comic and deadly serious. To point out the deconstructive potential of assuming the posture of God Jesus forms the image of a human who has a big ol’ plank in his eye sitting in judgment over someone who has but a speck in her eye. The plank is a comic image, like the camel in 19:24 or the straining of gnats in 23:24, except that the discovery of our own sins is so blatantly humiliating. We sometimes assume the posture of God against other humans; then, when the light begins to shine on our own sins, we are convicted of the sin and stand before God in the hope of mercy and grace. Jesus’ plank versus speck could simply be an exaggerated way of saying what Paul says in Romans 2:1: “because you who pass judgment [krinō] do the same things.” In other words, the point may be not that we have worse sins than others but that we have sins too.
Alternative to Condemning (7:5)
This paragraph ends where one might not have thought. To avoid the powerful indictment of being called “you hypocrite,” we must clean up our own act by removing the plank of our own sins. Then we will see clearly enough (1) not to posture ourselves as God but instead (2) in mercy to seek to help the other who has but a peccadillo that could be removed. Moral discernment is necessary for the disciple; it shows that genuine love and friendship, to b
orrow from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as well as from Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:15–20 about church discipline, mean commitment to moral progress with one another; and it shows that once we get ourselves properly postured under God, we can join others in mutual sanctification and growth as kingdom followers of Jesus.
What Jesus does here is complex: he creates self-awareness leading to self-judgment; this leads to humility, which in turn leads to repentance and sanctification; this leads to the kind of humility that treats other sinners with mercy (cf. Gal. 6:1; Jas 2:13); it creates a kingdom society shaped not by condemnation but humility, love, and forgiveness.7
LIVE the Story
Followers of Jesus take up his vision and put the kingdom into play in the here and now. Instead of waiting for the age to come to actualize God’s will, Jesus’ disciples pray that the kingdom may happen now (6:10). There is a long history of a struggle with kings in Israel’s Story: what began as a theocracy with local judges (see Judges) up through Samuel became, reluctantly for God, a monarchy in which God appointed kings (from Saul on).
But the vision of God, as Tom Wright has so well expounded in a steady stream of books, including Simply Jesus and How God Became King, is that God would someday once again reign himself, this time through his Davidic Son, the Messiah King. In that day there would be no need for someone to condemn. Instead, as a community marked by love, peace, justice, and reconciliation, disciples would not resort to judgment but would pursue mutual sanctification and fellowship. Jesus is not offering here in 7:1–5 a society of blanket tolerance or moral indifference; instead, he is reaching forward into the age to come and pulling it back into the present for his followers. It is an Ethic from Beyond.
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