Judge not, lest ye be judged

UPDATED 9 June 2006

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that at least four out every five times that I’ve heard somebody quote that line – and I’ve heard it quoted more times than I can count – the person quoting it has no more intention of living life according to Christ’s moral principles than does your average working-on-marriage-number-seven Hollywood celebrity. People quote it the way they approvingly quote Polonius’s “This above all, to thine own self be true,” without the vaguest notion that they're only quoting part of a sentence (and that the whole sentence doesn't mean what they think it means), or that Shakespeare put those words in the mouth of a man whose perfectly appropriate epitaph is, "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!" That is, they quote it, and I have to restrain myself from coming back with them in the persona of Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means."

So I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about what Jesus’ statement actually does mean, at least so far as I can tell.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” comes from a long collection of Jesus’ teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount. Now, one interesting thing about this collection is that it mixes together two quite different kinds of advice.

On the one hand, you have statements that are clearly moral prescriptions – “Turn the other cheek,” for example, or the one that caused Jimmy Carter to come a cropper, viz., if you look at a woman lustfully you’ve already committed adultery with her in your heart. On the other hand, you have statements that are not moral prescriptions, but are instead shrewd advice about how life really works. “Make peace with your adversary before he takes you to court and cleans you out,” for example. So the very first question to ask ourselves is simply this: is, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” a moral command, or a piece of practical advice?

Different people can have different opinions on this one, but my own opinion is that it’s the latter – although it is paired with a closely related piece of moral advice. Here’s the whole passage having to do with judgment (NIV):

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Jesus then goes on to add:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Note, by the way, that Jesus certainly appears to assume that removing a speck from your brother’s eye is not in itself a bad thing (which rules out the most common interpretation of “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” in the mouth of an American, said interpretation being, “If there’s a speck in your brother’s eye, pretend there’s nothing wrong with that”). His complaint is with the hypocricy of pretending you’re morally superior to others when in fact your own problems dwarf theirs.

But let’s get back to, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” It seems to me that what Jesus is doing here is simply pointing to a fact that ought to be pretty obvious from experience: if you don’t cut other people any slack when they screw up, then you’d bloody well better never screw up yourself or else you’re going to get no mercy. Whatever you dish out, people will generally see that later on you have to take it. If you have dealt out gentleness and mercy, then when your turn comes there’s a good chance that people will react to your own failings the same way. But if you use people’s faults as a lever for their destruction, then God help you when they figure out what your own faults are.

There’s a classic example of the mutually-assured-destruction dynamic going on in the blogosphere right now. A gentleman named Tim Russo has been, shall we say, unkind to persons whose public behavior fails to meet with his satisfaction. He’s done lots of blogging and done, it seems, rather more than his share of judgmental attack-blogging.

This was a very silly thing for him to do, however, for one simple reason: Mr. Russo’s past includes a criminal conviction (case #414621, year 2001) for attempting to disseminate material “harmful to juveniles,” and importuning a minor (that is, he tried to get somebody he thought was younger than sixteen to agree to have sexual relations with him). In other words, this is somebody whom the average person would consider a pedophile and sex offender (though you’d have to be a lawyer to know whether the law would apply those terms to him, which I am not).

Enter “HeightsMom” Cindy Zawadski, a fellow Democrat who was honked off at his constant bitterness and judgmentalism. According to her story, she got to wondering, “What’s up with this guy? Why is he so bitter?” So she did a web search and discovered the court case. She promptly posted full details, complete with links, under the heading, Hypocricy, Thy Name Is Russo. Her fundamental point, as she later explained in the comments, with bold print: “Many people, like me, will take offense to being lectured about morals by a convicted felon.”

And in the end, just a few days ago, Russo’s local paper (at which, unsurprisingly for someone with his tongue, he seems to have acquired an enemy) printed a list of local blogger profiles – and described him as something like “trying to rebuild his credibility after the revelation of his conviction for importuning a minor.” Devastated, Russo has closed down his blog with these two posts. You can't help but feel that it's too bad that Russo's parents never explained to him the two sides of the coin: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy; but in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Tim’s supporters on his blog miss the point entirely by talking as though Tim was targeted for his ideas. But it is not the content of his ideas that made his destruction inevitable – it was the judgmentalism with which he expressed them. And now, devastatingly, he has been judged. That is how the world works.

But let’s not stop there. Let’s go back to Ms. Zawadski (who no longer blogs, by the way I'm delighted to learn still blogs at http://heightsmom.blogspot.com -- still very much a Democrat, and a very hard-working blogger with nice coverage indeed of recent Ohio Democratic get-togethers...and also, I am delighted to report, a brand-new baby boy. Pop over to her site and leave her some congratulations on young Konrad...). Cindy had plenty of people in her comments who agreed with her. But it might already have occurred to some of you that Ms. Zawadski could be seen as...well, passing judgment on Mr. Russo. It certainly occurred to some of the people in her comments, who had things to say like, “Yet who annointed [sic] you our defender and Tim’s judge? On whose moral authority did you act?” Or, if you want unintentionally hilarious foaming-at-the-mouth over-the-top reaction:

But apparently, people like you Cindy still believe we should try all sins again and again, even after we have paid for them.

I suppose you'd like a monarchy too. And perhaps an abolition on slavery to go with your penchant for branding others.

Pathetic.

In short, Cindy passed judgment; and as a result, others passed judgment on her.

And now here I sit pointing out that those others were in their turn being judgmental...which opens an obvious avenue for commentors here to point out that I'm passing judgment on Cindy's commentors...and as far as I know, there’s nothing to stop the process from going on from now until the end of time.