DO YOU KNOW somebody that you would consider to be “judgmental”? How do you feel when you’re around them? Maybe you experience them as cantankerous and abrasive. They’re quick to criticize and act as if they’re always and obviously right. They jump to conclusions and don’t listen well. It may feel like a chore to be around them. And they may even be Christians who say they believe in a gospel of grace but show little grace toward others.

Aren’t judgmental people the worst?

And…if you didn’t get the irony of what I just said, we need to talk.

AS WE’VE SEEN, Jesus warns his hearers against passing judgment on others. It’s not that it’s wrong to exercise “good judgment,” especially when it comes to being morally and spiritually wise, as much of the New Testament and even the Sermon on the Mount assumes. It’s a matter of remembering, humbly, that God is the ultimate judge, and if we dare to judge others in a harsh way that lacks grace, we invite God to do the same with us. And what chance would we have if God were to judge us solely by the standard of his own holiness?

Jesus then continues the lesson, using a metaphor that may have come naturally to a carpenter’s son:

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. (Matt 7:3-5, NIV)

The image is probably meant to be a humorous one, and hopefully, everyone got the joke. Picture someone trying to do the delicate job of picking a speck out of someone’s eye, but ignoring an entire plank of wood sticking out of his own eye; who wouldn’t laugh at the irony?

But the lesson is a serious one. Jesus uses the language of “brother” here, which suggests that he’s referring to behavior between believers. And note that, again, he doesn’t say that people should refrain from taking specks from each other’s eyes, just as he doesn’t say that people should refrain from all forms of judgment.

What he’s condemning is hypocrisy, the tendency for some within a religious community to get puffed up with their own supposed superiority, making it their mission to correct the minor faults of others. They’re not necessarily wrong about the faults they see. The problem is the faults they don’t see: their own.

What Jesus is after is a community of believers who are willing and able to exercise good moral judgment and spiritual discernment in relationship to each other, but who do so with humility and appropriate self-examination. It is only with such a humble mindset that people are able to offer the kind of correction that is truly for the benefit of the community.

Think what that could mean for how sermons are preached from the pulpit. Preachers would prepare not only by searching God’s word, but by allowing God’s word to search them. Harsh words of condemnation would be replaced by humble words of encouragement, as preachers identified with a congregation’s struggles instead of assuming a self-righteous tone.

Think what it could mean for the relationship between sisters and brothers in the church. People would be committed to honest self-examination, but also to the holiness of the community. Instead of an attitude of “Mind your own business,” there would be a common commitment to minding God’s business in a context of mutual understanding, humility, and grace.

What would need to change for our own congregations to fit that description?

LET ME ADD one psychological note. There’s a sense in which the kind of hypocritical judgment Jesus describes may be baked into our fallen human nature. One of the best-established findings of psychological research is the widespread existence of a biased way of thinking known as the fundamental attribution error. That’s a technical sounding name for a simple phenomenon.

For our purposes here, the essence of it is this. When we see people behave badly, we need to explain it to ourselves. If we’re being generous, we might attribute the behavior to circumstances: yes, what the person did was wrong, but anyone could have made the same mistake in such circumstances. The less generous interpretation is to attribute the behavior to a person’s character: they did what they did because they’re a bad and blameworthy person.

Here’s the rub: the evidence suggests that we have a persistent bias in which we are more generous with ourselves than we are with others. We did what we did because we made a mistake; we blame our circumstances. But they did what they did because they’re bad in some way; we blame their character.

Just think about that for a moment. How often do we jump to judgmental conclusions about someone else solely on the basis of hearsay or gossip? How is that judgmental stance matched by our own perhaps subtle satisfaction that we would never do something like that? How much are we willing to give the benefit of the doubt and at least try to understand the person’s situation?

It reminds me of a true story I heard in college, about a judgmental young woman — we’ll call her Judy — who was part of a Bible study group. When it came time for prayer requests, another young woman in the group confessed to being pregnant by her boyfriend. With obvious self-righteousness, Judy blurted out, “Thank God I’m a virgin!”

The group leader turned to her and quietly asked, “Has anyone ever asked you to sleep with them?” Judy huffed indignantly and said, “Of course not!” The leader then responded quietly but firmly, “Then don’t confuse virtue with a lack of opportunity.”

Crickets.

We don’t have to shy away from wise judgment and mutual correction. That’s especially important given some of what Jesus will say next in the sermon. But knowing what he teaches about right judgment, and knowing that we have an inherent self-serving bias in the way we judge behavior, let’s commit to humble self-reflection and gentleness whenever correction may be needed.