Do Not Judge: What the Warning Actually Says (8 of 9)

This is the most quoted sentence in the sermon and the one most often used to end conversations rather than start them.

It is not a ban on moral discernment, and the passage says so within five verses by asking its hearers to make a fairly severe judgement.

What Is Being Warned Against?

Playing God, and Wright puts it exactly that way.

He is not saying we should have no standards for ourselves or our world. The temptation being named is the temptation to look down on each other for moral failures, and that is a temptation to occupy a position that is not ours.

And since we are not God, taking that position means playing a part. Which is where the word hypocrite comes from: it means a stage actor, someone wearing a mask.

So the charge is not sternness. It is pretending to an office you do not hold.

What Happens to People Who Do It?

Three things, and the passage lists them.

The judgement bounces back. The measure used gets used on the user. And while they are patronisingly sorting out other people’s problems, their own grow large enough to block their sight.

That last one is the plank, and the image is deliberately absurd. A man with a beam in his eye offering to extract a speck from someone else’s is not merely wrong, he is physically incapable of the delicate work he is proposing.

Does It Rule Out Ever Helping Anyone?

No, and the text is careful about this.

Jesus does not say the speck should stay. He says first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s.

Wright reads that as leaving the possibility open. Some people will eventually be able to help others with their specks. There is such a thing as public morality.

The warning lands on sequence rather than on the activity. The people most eager to tell others what to do are precisely the ones who should look in a mirror first.

What About the Dogs and the Pigs?

That verse is startling immediately after a warning against judging, and it should be.

Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw pearls before pigs. That requires deciding that some people belong in those categories, which is a judgement.

Wright’s reading is that Jesus is assuming a distinction between his own community, village and town life in Galilee within the Jewish world, and people outside it. Dogs was a standard term of abuse for Gentiles. Pigs were kept only by Gentiles, since Jews did not eat pork.

On that account the warning is practical rather than contemptuous: do not try to explain the meaning of the kingdom to people who do not have the framework in which it makes sense.

It sits awkwardly next to what precedes it, and the awkwardness is worth leaving visible rather than smoothing. A reader who notices the tension has read the passage correctly.

How Do You Tell a False Prophet?

By the fruit, and Wright contrasts that with the older test.

In the Old Testament the test was to wait and see. If a prophet says something will happen, you find out whether he was truthful when it does or does not.

Jesus offers a quicker method. Look at the life of the person giving you the advice. Is there healthy fruit on this tree? Are people genuinely nourished by it? Or is the crop lies, immorality and greed?

And the fruit cannot be showy displays of spiritual power, because false prophets produce those readily. What counts is deeper and more personal.

Wright then turns it on the church, which is where it stings. The temptation inside a church is to ask a different question entirely. Is he one of us? Does she belong to my party, my tradition? But parties and traditions attract genuine believers and hangers-on alike, so the label tells you nothing. The only reliable test is the fruit.

What Does Depart From Me, I Never Knew You Mean?

That some people will arrive on that day with an impressive list and be told he never knew them.

Prophecy in his name. Exorcisms. Mighty works. Every item on that list is the showy spiritual power Wright just said false prophets can produce.

Which is why the sermon closes where it does, with two builders and a storm that hits both houses. The difference was never the visible structure.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount. See also the two builders, which closes the sermon.

Footnotes2

1. Hypocrite meaning stage actor is the detail that reframes the whole passage. The charge is not that such people are too strict. It is that they are performing a role, and specifically the role of the one entitled to pass verdicts, which belongs to somebody else.
2. That the impressive list in verse 22 consists of exactly the things false prophets can counterfeit is easy to miss. Prophecy, exorcism and mighty works are named a few verses after Wright's point that showy spiritual power proves nothing. Matthew appears to be building that connection deliberately.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-15 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 7:1-6 and 7:13-23. Supports the reading of judging as playing God and therefore acting a part, the observation that the possibility of helping is left open, the identification of dogs and pigs as terms for Gentiles, and the contrast between the Old Testament wait-and-see test and the fruit test. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 7:1-23, Deut 18:21-22.

Where the sourcing stops: the relationship between the warning against judging and the instruction about dogs and pigs is genuinely awkward, and this post names the tension rather than resolving it.