The culture around us may not have much knowledge of the Bible, but everyone still seems to know and freely quote these words: “Judge not.” People may not know much, but they do know that the Bible strictly warns against standing in judgment against anyone else. Christians expend no little effort in explaining how “judge not” is not actually a blanket condemnation of all assessments of another person’s behavior, but a warning against passing judgement too freely, too often, or on the wrong basis.
But for all that, we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the force of Jesus’s words. In Luke 6:37 he does, after all, say very simply: “Judge not” and “condemn not.” Just like most explanations of Romans 13 focus more on what the words don’t mean rather than what they do, so too Luke 6:37. (Douglas Moo: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of the interpretation of Romans 13:1-7 is the history of attempts to avoid what seems to be its plain meaning.”) So what is Jesus saying when he forbids judgment and condemnation (and, as he continues, when he commands forgiveness and generosity)? I think what Jesus is doing here is setting up two different kinds of community. Speaking to his followers with the knowledge that they will soon form themselves into assemblies or churches, he warns against one kind of community while commending another.
Two Kinds of Community
The first community, the one Jesus warns against, has four major characteristics.
- It’s a community of judgment, where people are scrutinizing one another’s lives to look for evidence of sin and failure, and then harshly judging them for what they see there. There’s a lot of nit-picking and ruthlessness going on.
- It’s a community of condemnation, where people are actively looking for each other’s flaws and foibles and then being hard-hearted or compassionless when they spot them.
- It’s a community of resentfulness, where the people are harboring bitterness. They are slow to repent when they’ve sinned against others and even slower to forgive when others have sinned against them.
- It’s a community of selfishness, where each person is looking out primarily for his own interests rather than the interests of others.