Welcome to our daily podcast! We hope you are well this Tuesday. My name is James. We are continuing to look at the most famous sermon in history, Jesus’ sermon on the mount.  Today our passage is Matthew 7:1-14.  There is SO MUCH stuff we could look at here. Some of it is strange to our ears. Some of it is ludicrous and unbelievable. The first half is about relationships (the kind of relationships Jesus wants us to have in Christian communities – in fact, all communities) and the second half is about prayer. We won’t look at that in detail in this podcast but the helpful illustration is that if we want to have relationships that look like verses 1-6, we can practice praying like verses 7-11. The full reading of the verses is in the podcast description or in your, real life, actual Bible. Today we will be focussing on the first 6 verses.

REFLECTION:

Now before we get into it. I recently watched a docudrama on Netflix called the Social Dilemma. A short film that tracks the influence of big  tech companies like Facebook and others. It’s one of those documentaries that has divided opinion, which is ironic in itself and we will get to why. Of course, people more informed than I have been speaking about this for years but this production was tracking the rise in social media against the divisiveness we find in our opinions, especially our economics, our politics and ethics. Statistically, we are more polarised now than 30 years ago but we have less examples of how to disagree well.

And so we have our Bible verses.

Judging Others

“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.

“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.

What is Jesus forbidding here? Is Jesus saying we are not to form any sort of opinion about others (v5)? Well no. He can’t mean that. Because he regularly disagrees with the ideas and practices of the status quo around him. Think for a moment of Jesus turning over the tables in the temple in Matthew 21. He can’t mean that. There are deeper heart-attitudes that Jesus is condemning. One that comes to mind for for us to think through today is that of superiority.

In other words, what the motive behind our disagreement? Do we judge others in the sense of condemning and punishing? Or when we criticise are we trying to strengthen the relationship? Let me illustrate this. There are many things I have learned from our interim leaders Tom and Clarissa Finnemore. I won’t start a list here. But, if you haven’t noticed, Tom has a way with phrases. His mind is like a sponge for TV quotes, Bible verses and idioms that just makes me cringe. One of my favourites is when he says, “my lovely wife will give me feedback for that”. I’ve began to adopt it into our family language. To mixed reviews right now… but here is why I love it. We sometimes have to disagree with one another. That’s the brutal reality of life. And in the messy and beautiful process of maturing any healthy relationship and/or community, there are going to be times when we do not see eye to eye and we are going to have to give each other feedback. The spirit the feedback is given in is of the upmost importance. Criticism tears down. Feedback listens first, evaluates and responds. And the world needs more of that right now.

To finish, we have the famous metaphor used by Jesus about the speck in the eyes of others and the plank in our own. When we have anything like this in our eyes we simply can’t see. Even just the smallest of things can cause your eye to water or worse....