God Provides

by Elaine Poproski

“Do not judge.”

That’s how the third chapter of the Sermon on the Mount begins.

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.”

Jesus is never one for subtlety and hiding His meaning behind vague words and phrases. Especially in this Sermon on the Mount, He wants to be super clear to His disciples about what it means to be a disciple. “Do not judge.” But is it really as simple as it sounds?

On the face of it, yes, it is as simple as it sounds. “Do not judge.” But, doesn’t Jesus expect us to judge between things that are of God and things that are not? Are we not required to be discerning – to differentiate between good and bad and thus declare judgment? Surely Jesus isn’t suggesting that our post-modern preoccupation with relativism and the accompanying supremacy of personal experience over all other modes of knowing and understanding the world is God’s way? If that were true, I suspect much of the Bible would be irrelevant. Why would God bother with commandments if we could trust our experience alone to inform us rightly?

I think there might be a clue in a phrase my mother used to say a lot, especially during the years she worked in daycare. She used to say, “There’s no such thing as a bad kid.” She would say this especially frequently when a kid was misbehaving. What she meant was that while a child’s behaviour might be “bad” or unacceptable, the child was not. The child was not his/her behaviour. I heard this same sentiment expressed a short time ago by someone who has struggled with addictions. He was responding to someone’s statement, “I am an addict.” “No you’re not!” he declared vehemently, “You’re a child of God who happens to have addictions.”

As I think about the way Jesus was with people, I think this distinction is important. People are not the sum total of their behaviours. And while Jesus gives us a great example of not shying away from judging behaviour and words and the like, He does not permit the judgment of the person. God alone has the authority, the right, and the responsibility to judge people. And I think, as we dig into Matthew 7 these next three weeks, we will come to understand that while sin is a reality and while all Jesus’ disciples are expected to be vigilant against it, we are equally expected to leave the judging of people up to God. In that, our only responsibility is to love.

As you prepare for Sunday, I invite you to take some time to think about what it might look like if we lived in a world in which no one judged people. How is it that we can judge actions, behaviours, words, etc., without also judging people? As we head to the polls to vote for a provincial government, what does it look like to judge such that we can vote, without judging people? Can behaviours and words really be separated from the people who act and speak? Jesus seems to think so.