When judgment goes toxic (and what to do instead) (Romans 14.1-14; Matthew 18.21-35)

Welcome to some John's Canberra Talks, our recordings of our Sunday sermons at St. John's Anglican Church in Canberra, Australia. We'd love for you to come and visit us when you can, and you can find our details at www. St. John's Canberra, STJOHNS Canberra, all one word.org. Thanks. I think each of our scripture readings tonight in their own way are inviting us to consider what it means to stand before God. A powerful, demanding, but also scandalously forgiving God. So I invite you to come into worship tonight and invite you to bring whatever has gone through your week this week, the ups and the downs, the disappointments, the successes, the joys, the uncertainties, hand these over to God and be willing to consider them in an eternal perspective tonight. So to begin our time in worship, I'm going to invite you to listen to these words which come from Psalm 89, and I think, again, invite us to consider what it means to live and stand before a powerful God. So hear these words and let these draw you to worship tonight. Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord. Your faithfulness and the assembly of the Holy Ones. For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord? A God feared in the counsel of the Holy Ones, great and awesome above all that are around him. O Lord God of hosts, who is as mighty as you, O Lord? Your faithfulness surrounds you. You rule the raging of the sea when its waves rise, you still them. The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours, the world, and all that is in it, you have founded them. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. Steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. Happy are the people who know the festal shout, who walk O Lord in the light of your countenance. They exalt in your name all day long and extol your righteousness. For you are the glory of their strength. By your favor our horn is exalted. For our shield belongs to the Lord, our King, to the Holy One of Israel. Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat. For God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own Lord that they stand or fall. They will be upheld for the Lord is able to make them stand. Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike, that all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day observe it in honour to the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honour to the Lord since they give thanks to God, while those who abstain, abstain with honour of the Lord and give thanks to God. We do not live to ourselves and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lords. For to this end Christ died and lived again so that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister or you? Why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before judgment siege of God. For it is written, as I live says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall give praise to God. So then each of us will be accountable to God. That's therefore no longer past judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another. I know and I'm persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive as many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but I tell you, 77 times." For this reason, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him, and as he could not pay, his Lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, "Have patience with me, and I will repay you everything." And out of pity for him, the Lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denari and seizing him by the throat, he said, "Pay what you owe." Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you." But he refused, then he went and threw him into prison until he could repay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their Lord, all that had taken place. Then his Lord summoned him and said to him, "You wicked slave, I forgave all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you, and in his anger his Lord handed him over to be tortured until he would repay the entire debt. So my Heavenly Father will also do for every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." One of my most difficult experiences was when I wrote something sort of out in public that someone didn't like, and I found myself at the centre of a Twitter storm, as it was called back then. One of those social media tornadoes of moralistic outrage, complete with name-calling, put-downs, and powerful assertions about my motives, or the distant relative who said, "Scathing things about members of my family, many harsh things said with total conviction, and nothing would convince them otherwise." What leaves you feeling nauseated and shunned, doesn't it? That kind of treatment will do anything to avoid that kind of experience. Our two New Testament passages this evening have enough to keep us occupied, so I'm going to focus on them tonight. On the face of it, both of those passages, the one from Romans and the one from Matthew's gospel, have a nice ring. Jesus says, "Be forgiving, don't judge," says St. Paul, plenty here to like for modern camberans. We generally like to think of ourselves as tolerant, easygoing, non-judgemental, but more goes on here than meets the eye. We start with that passage from Paul's letter, and you might actually find it super helpful to have page 173 open because I'm going to jump around a bit in that passage. Besides with that letter from Paul, we'll need some backstory to make sense of what is going on here. He addresses a situation where some have very strong feelings about what foods you should and should not eat. We may have met people like that who believe everyone should go vegan or paleo, they're very pushy about it, but the situation here goes far deeper, actually. It's rooted in Old Testament laws, specifying foods like bacon or shellfish or whatever as unclean to eat those things these people believed was directly to disobey God. Similarly, those who held strictly to the command to do no work on the Sabbath and thought that others should be likely to do the same, but Paul, though he be a Jew, thinks those Old Testament laws are not binding upon us because Christ's work has surpassed them and made them sort of obsolete. We'd have to discuss another day which parts of the Old Testament do remain for us today, but for these two cases, food and Sabbath strictures, he thinks they don't remain in place. And those who do, he reckons, have a kind of a weak faith in Christ, that term weak that he begins with. Not a put down that, by the way, just a way of saying those folk are new to it and they haven't put all the theological pieces together yet. And at the very end of the passage verse 14, you can hear pretty much him saying that. straight out. First of all, I know and I'm persuaded in the Lord Jesus and nothing is unclean in itself. But it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. And that last little bit, that last clause, gets at something also incredibly important that you don't make someone do something that they think is wrong, even if you are fairly certain that it's okay. Or as you put it in verse 13, just before that, don't put a stumbling block or a hindrance in the way of another. That will do them damage, even if it doesn't damage you. And so all of that leads him very mildly to say in verse five, "Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike, let all be fully convinced in their own minds." That's why he's also said in verse three, "Those who eat must not despise those who abstain." And conversely, those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat. I wonder if you find that a little surprising. It's almost lasso fear, isn't it? Go with what seems right to you and don't judge. Those sound like very modern thoughts, don't they? Now we won't say that about everything. But in these matters that have taken on too much importance, step lightly, he says, "What are those in your world? What are the matters that have taken on too much importance where people get very heated but where we should step much more lightly?" Where people go at it for the purpose, as he says in verse one, of quarreling over opinions. In the old translation, it says, "For the purpose of doubtful disputations." I love that. And Christians are very prone to this, aren't they? Christians are very prone to what we might call the narcissism of small differences. The narcissism of small differences, we are highly energized to condemn people who are only a little different from us. What Bible translation they use. Now their ministers dress at church. How they dress at church. What music is sound? And all that before you even get to the bigger ticket items that may actually matter. If we're going to tease this out, we really need to focus on this word "judge" that keeps popping up again and again in this passage. You're going to read four of the key verses where this word "judge" pops up to bear with me. Verse three, "Those who eat must not despise those who abstain. Those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat. For God has welcomed them." Verse four, "Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?" Well, verse ten, "Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or why do you despise your brother or sister?" Verse 13, "Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another." Did you hear in that collection of verses how he pairs his kind of judging with despising, with contempt? I felt quite despised by those Twitter people and to some extent, by that relative, the acid of their contempt, just gnawing at me, washing over me, judging as despising. That's the poison right there and we humans excel at it. We can disagree, says Paul, on the food and the Sabbath, but we won't be doing the despising. It goes along with the narcissism of small differences and we certainly don't rub our neighbors' nose into making them do something that seems wrong to them. So far so clear, but we can be a bit simplistic about this word "judging" because did you also notice? In verse five, when he says, "Some judge one day to be better than another while others judge all days, to be alike." You can sense a difference there, can't you? Between the judging as despising, versus what's going on there, in verse five, which I think we just call making a judgment call, if you like, making a judgment call on what's right. And we have to do this all the time, don't we? We have to judge in this sense all the time, do we not? A deliberative, evaluative decision about what's right. And Paul makes a kind of wordplay on this. It's literally hidden in our translation. I'm going to read it to you in the version you heard. Then I'm going to take us back to the old timey version, which really illuminates this wordplay. So in verse 13, let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead, never to put a stumbling block or a hindrance in the way of another. So here it is in the King James Version, to see if you can hear the wordplay. Let us not therefore judge one another anymore, but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way. Did you hear that? So stop the despising kind of judging and start the judgment call kind of judging on how never to harm your brother or sister. And indeed, there are folks, there are those among us, aren't they, for whom that is their job? That is their profession. We call them judges. They are those who are tasked to make specific judgment calls about what and who are right and wrong. And the King or Lord in Jesus' story makes that kind of judgment call. We're going to return a bit later to Jesus' quite hard edge way of talking in that parable, but the punchline as the King making a correct judgment call. And that kind of judge also appears in Paul's letter and Paul sort of glides up into it when he starts at verse 8, when he says whether we live or whether we die, we're the Lord's. Verse 9, "For to this end Christ died and lived again so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living." So it follows that if Christ owns each of us, who are you to pass judgment on the servants of another? Verse 4, "It is before their own Lord that they stand or fall." Then he gets in verse 10, "To we will all stand before the judgment seat of God." Twitter people, scathing relatives, "Anybody who judges and despises you will all stand before the judgment seat of God." For verse 11, it is written, "As I live says the Lord every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall give praise to God so that each of us will be accountable to God." Now if you are used to how bad it feels when humans have judged and despised you, I would understand if you were terrified at the thought of something like that happening with God, of being accountable to God at that judgment seat. Is that going to be the same kind of experience? Well no, because verse 3, "God has already welcomed, already welcomed," did you see, "the people that others were judging." That could be you, could be you, somebody welcomed in by God. And when in verse 4, he says, "It is before their own Lord that they stand or fall." What does he then go on to point out? Can you say that they will be upheld for the Lord is able to make them stand. This is a kind of God we're dealing with. Somebody welcomes who upholds, enables people to stand before him. I semi look forward, semi look forward to the judgment seat of God nowadays, not because I think I'm quite nice, quite the opposite actually. I'm going to return to that too. But that the Lord who welcomes and upholds me will finally tell me the truth about me in a way that I know I need. Because what was the real problem? What was the real problem with that Twitter snore? My relative, with those people who judge and despise you, in each case, in each case they like to think that they are telling the truth about you. Those arrogant, confident assertions about what you did, your motives, all your defects, they we imagine that we've nailed it. Seen into the other, totally encompassed them by the power and quality of our superior intellect. And your psychologists have some names for stuff like this, for behaviors like this. For example, the fundamental attribution error, the fundamental attribution error, the belief that we can unerringly see into the motives and moral quality of another human being. We can't, we don't know that truth. The one who welcomes and upholds though does know the truth of yours and my innermost parts and at core it will bear a leaf to be judged by this one. To have explained to me the reasons that I did my bad and stupid things and yet because of Christ's saving work am yet welcomed and upheld. You look forward to that for you. You expect that for others and your need to judge and despise them will melt away. And your main goal will become to assist them not to stumble on the way to that future. I think all of that goes some way to explain Jesus very stark parable about forgiveness. And we will return to how for some of us someone has hurt us so terribly that forgiveness seems insurmountable. We will come back to that promise. But with this parable, you do get, don't you, that the scenario here is a king's court, a sort of household on steroids, maybe like a sort of feudal setup with a lord and dozens of household servants with Jesus picturing a kind of court intrigue. People even wonder with these parables if Jesus was riffing on actual current affairs in his parables. Maybe a tale like this that people had already heard. There's no evidence either way for that. We can't be sure, but the king in this parable does have all the hallmarks of a Gentile ruler, which is by the way why you shouldn't get too stark on the mention of torture at the end of it or the mention of the guy's wife and kids being sold into slavery. That was something that Jewish kings wouldn't and weren't allowed to do. But it was simply the kind of way that ancient Near Eastern magnates did things. We don't have to hear Jesus as commending that stuff so much as observing it. But I reckon the nub of this parable, a driving force of it, sits at the very beginning of it in verse 26. "Now patience on me, and I will pay you everything." And out of pity for him, the Lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. Did you see how this Lord did not even agree to do what my electricity company has kindly offered, which is to set up a payment plan? Didn't give the guy what he requested. He releases him. He zeroes out the debt. He absorbs the whole loss into himself. Somehow in this, seeing the truth of that man's condition, welcoming him, upholding him. But when this guy then seizes his debt or by the throat and hurls him into the dungeon, we're back into judging as despising. Aren't we? And maybe even that fundamental attribution area. You owe me your evil. I know what you deserve. That wrong-headed human claim yet again to know all truth about another person. And let's not overthink it either. This parable is not complex. It bespeaks Jesus' consistent theme. That your best guide in treating others is in how you want to be treated. Now if you seven verse 12 and everything due to others, you would have them due to you for that's the law and the prophets. He says that I'll add it to you. It sums up the old testament. And in this area, you love being forgiven. So forgive. Not rocket science on paper, but easily one of the hardest things we're ever going to have to learn as Christians. Because again, the psychologists name our dozens of mental failures, cognitive biases, they call them, that cause us to be easy on ourselves and hard on others. Observe a bias, self-serving bias, post-hoc justification, double standards, jumping to conclusions excuses for self-condemnations of others, spec in their eye, plank in mind, when I'm driving, when I'm late to compare to when they're late, when they're socially awkward, compared to when I'm socially awkward, when others are grumpy, compared to when I am grumpy, with all sorts of people, with people that I find difficult in the workplace, with people in my family. And you know, Jesus is constantly messaging that what He calls love consists in training ourselves in a kind of mind site that at very least gives to others the same breaks that we give to ourselves. And you know, I'm not a real fan of when preachers like me kind of beat their breasts and say a little too easily, oh, you know, this applies to me too. I felt really uneasy, to be honest, putting this together today because of several bad habits I realized that I've hardened into. I've spoken of others just as I was spoken of in that Twitter storm. Or as that relative spoke of me and mine, it is definitely time for a course correction here. Nor need we be simplistic about that person who I mentioned who has been very, very seriously violated for whom forgiveness seems like to be saying, oh, it's okay, you didn't really hurt me because it was not okay. The sense of rage you might have bespeaks our precious United God, which that evil doer ignored. And plenty of psalmist plead for God's judgment, his truth telling that names the person's preciousness, vindicates them and holds wrongdoers to account. That judgment of God welcoming and upholding the oppressed and telling the truth about human affairs. And a person who's been really badly hurt may need to sit in that comforting truth for a long time before they can move on is a author called Brendan Dern who says forgiveness and unforgiveness may long wrestle in human heart. But God takes the long view and will never deny the grace necessary. God writes the final chapter in your human heart. But that's you. If you've seen it's been terribly violated, try and sit with how much God is on your side in this and bringing you through it. Now for the rest of us, keep forgiving, make discerning judgment calls, get some mind-sight about what others need and would like, assist them, not to stumble in their faith, leave the truth telling about them to God and wait on God to welcome you, to uphold you, and to tell you the final truth about you. That will be plenty enough for the days and years ahead. Amen. So as is our custom, we'll have a time of Q&A with Andrew. So if you've got a question for him after his sermon, just put your hand up. I've got two questions. They'll go and ask both. I guess one would be if if you were channeling Paul for us, I mean as our pastor, are there things that you would identify that seem to be kind of common, points of disagreement that are maybe we make them higher stakes than they actually are, you know, supposed to be weighted and we need this kind of role-evising word. And then I've got another one. Do you have this second one as well? I guess like what would be ways, given our propensity to fall prey to those cognitive biases and the fact that judgment day is a ways out. Like what are ways we can kind of receive truth about ourselves? What are kind of channels of that or kind of, you know, sources of receiving, you know, truth? That makes sense. Wow. That's a great thought. On the first one, I'm reminded of that thing that used to be said, probably still, said of Australians, that Australians will bet on two flies crawling up a wall, right? So we'll gamble on, I don't know you and I, but a lot of people will just, doesn't matter what it is, will gamble on things. I'm going to flip that and say Australians will judge each other about, you know, two flies crawling up a wall on anything. So I don't actually find it easy to answer that question because I think this habit of being judgey is so riddled into human affairs, it's happening all around us all the time to the point you don't even notice it and then you start doing it, you know? There's some sort of classic other things that maybe we could talk about among Christians, whether or not you can see in alcohol. That's a sort of an interesting one because some people are sensorious about that in a way that might fit the bill. But there's other important elements of alcohol consumption we do want to think about, you know? Or people will divide over, you know, churchy things like, you know, the style of the Eucharist or something like that. But, you know, to be honest, I mean, I just think that it's like looking through a kaleidoscope, the number of ways that people can find to judge each other, just endless. And our creativity in this is extraordinary. And you kind of just got to be alert for it. You got to get the eyes to see it and flush it out when it's happening, I think. Because I don't think there's any one list of things that we can kind of just look for. And in terms of finding the truth, I think it's important to say that actually really is the case that God is going to be the final truth tell about us. But we can start zeroing in on it to some extent. If I guess we're open to hearing a little bit from others, you know, and sort of getting a bit of an approximation of ourselves from the perspective of several others, not everything that everyone says about is going to be right. But I think if you're worried about who you are and how you are coming across, find maybe three, four people that you're trusting, go, look, just tell me what you see, you know, just tell me what you see. And that's very rare thing to do in this culture because we're so defensive. We don't want to know that. I invite you to sort of give it a go, you know, just say, look, I'm a little bit, I just don't know how I'm coming across. I don't know what blind spots are, "Would you do me the service of telling me what you see?" And you know what might actually be surprising, they might tell you good things, you know? One of the things that Scripture likes to do is talk about lists of virtues, things like love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, goodness, humility, self-control. You don't badge yourself with those things, you badge others with them. If those settled habits and patterns are in somebody else's life, we get to say that, we get to name that. So I think I see a person who's just incredibly kind all the time, I don't let me give you the examples. You know, this might surprise you to hear that the upside of who God is making you is visible to others. They'll give that a go, maybe. Thanks for your sermon, Andrew. I just wanted, if you could elaborate a bit on maybe another passage that just speaks about a forgiveness. It's Matthew 6, verse 14, where he says, "If you forgive others, their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." So you don't know about it, isn't he? And that's that sharp edge, and maybe I should have said, because that appears in the parable too, doesn't that the end? It's bedrock core Christianity. It's bedrock DNA of the Christian life that we give as we've been given. I think I'd want to say sort of two things that might sound a bit contradictory. One of the one hand Jesus is what we call a wisdom teacher. Like humanly speaking, he's picked up on the ways of getting drilling stuff into thick heads that people like in the Proverbs did, you know? So they speak in big headlines and crash opposites together and crash contrasts together. And it shocks you. Like it shocks you out of your brain, because you will hear that. If you as more sort of little bit of this, little bit of that, little bit of the other people would just walk away and not listen. So that statement stands, we've got to lean into being people of forgiveness. But conversely, you do get plenty of other hints both in Jesus' teaching and in the letters that follow Jesus' ministry. God is pretty good at forgiving Christians for besetting sins, including being pretty patchy at forgiving, I think. So we've got to kind of do both. We've got to hear the enormity of what Jesus is saying about how crucial it is to grow into this kind of person, but also be glad that there is one who welcomes us and enables us to stand, I think. So I want to kind of have both. I've been reading an interesting book about the Holocaust and getting, it kind of has in it a lot of different thinkers' reflections on the Holocaust and there's a big question kind of asked of all of them, should we forgive the Nazis for what they did? And a lot of them argue that to forgive would actually be dangerous because forgiveness is kind of condoning to some degree. And if we forgive those crimes, we're opening the door for them to happen again. These aren't Christian thinkers, but I'd just be interested to hear your thoughts on that and how that kind of view of what forgiveness is might differ from, I guess, the Christian belief. So three initial thoughts. Firstly, I will just put this aside for the moment. Sometimes I think in wider culture, they can conflate forgiveness with that kind of inner psychological posture of, "I'm just going to let this go," and that can be quite useful. A person who is able to get to, "I have a friend who went through a just grueling thing with another person whose life and hit him like a bolt from the blue in his kitchen, I've just got to let this go," right? Now that is kind of overlapping with forgiveness, but it's not the whole thing. The second thing, and this is a bit controversial, but I think that forgiveness is actually predicated on repentance. I'm not sure that you can forgive somebody who doesn't want to be forgiven, who thinks they've done no wrong. That's kind of the yin and yang of it in the Bible that it's when the personal repents that we forgive. So if, I guess, I did meet some Nazi, Nazi who was like, "Oh, what I did back then." Well, it's not in a sense not for me to forgive because I didn't do it to me, but I'm hoping I would hope that folks are able to kind of hear that and go, "I do forgive you. I'll wear the cost of what you did." And there's that, and I've lost the people's names in my head, but there was that amazing story several years ago of parents who, they were Christians and their daughter was brutally murdered, and this person was able to, they were able to sort of publicly say, "We forgive our daughter's murderer," and they started a thing called the forgiveness foundation, I think. But it's, it's, it's really cool. But thirdly, the person who, the person who, sorry, this is 2B, the person who doesn't repent, the white supremacist, the Nazi who just thinks that they did what they had to do. Well, that's why we have the judgements here to God because God will take that up with them. That won't go through to the keeper. There will be, there will be an accounting. I think the third thing to say, though, is I don't think we should give too much oxygen to that point that forgiveness is only going to go easy on people and condone things, because if you take that two-way, you're back at vengeance, right? You're back at vengeance. Unless we can at least find some way of doing some mercy towards others who have done heinous things, we'll have a society based on vengeance, you know. But they are right to say it's not a light thing, forgiveness shouldn't be easy. The person who's being forgiven needs to have some inkling of the enormity of what they've done, and I get to be pretty realistic about the enormity of what they've done, okay? So you can think have that enormity and still be a person who is heading towards forgiveness. But as big as that, that's a, you've picked the most important kind of edge case that is really exercising me, thanks, Will. Thanks, Andrew, much more to think about it and try to live in light of the gospel. If you hear nothing else tonight, hear these words of assurance from the Psalms. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him. As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. Amen. So we come not to a time of prayer, and to begin, I thought I'd share a poem by an English poet and priest named George Herbert, and it's titled Prayer. Prayer the church's banquet, angels age, God's breath and man returning to his birth, the soul and paraphrase, heart and pilgrimage, the Christian plummet, sounding heaven and earth. Then against the Almighty, sinners tower, reversed thunder, Christ's side piercing spear. The six days world transposing in an hour, a kind of tune which all things hear and fear. Softness and peace and joy in love and bliss, exalted man a gladness of the best, heaven in ordinary, man well dressed, the milky way, the bird of paradise, church bells beyond the stars heard, the souls blood, the land of spices, something understood. Ratchet's Lord, grant us your grace so that we may glorify and honor you as we worship together, enable us by your spirit to be a people that encourages and supports one another. Keep us from placing any stumbling blocks before anyone seeking you, or before our brothers and sisters in Christ. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer, God of all grace, we thank you that when we came to Christ, it was all through your grace. No matter how long or shorter time we have been following Christ, help us not to compare ourselves to others, but simply receive your grace and acknowledge it to others. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.