On Being Judgmental

 

Ezekiel 33: 7-9

7 So thou, O son of man, I have made thee a watchman to the house of Israel: therefore thou shalt hear the word from my mouth, and shalt tell it them from me.

8 When I say to the wicked: O wicked man, thou shalt surely die: if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked man from his way: that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but I will require his blood at thy hand.

9 But if thou tell the wicked man, that he may be converted from his ways, and he be not converted from his way: he shall die in his iniquity: but thou hast delivered thy soul.

Matthew 18: 

15: But if thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone. If he shall hear thee, thou shalt gain thy brother.

16 And if he will not hear thee, take with thee one or two more: that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may stand.

17 And if he will not hear them: tell the church. And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican.

18 Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven.

19 Again I say to you, that if two of you shall consent upon earth, concerning any thing whatsoever they shall ask, it shall be done to them by my Father who is in heaven.

20 For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

The postmodernists insist we must never be “judgmental.” We must never accuse others of wrongdoing. This Sunday’s readings demonstrate that this attitude is unbiblical and immoral.

We are all the sons of men. Ezekiel makes plain that this gives us an obligation to point out to others when they are sinning. If we do not, we will be held accountable for their sin. We have aided and abetted it. Above all else, we owe it to the sinner to advise them of their sin.

A point it seems lost on Pope Francis.

At the same time, this obligation is limited to the “House of Israel.” There is, after all, no point in trying to help someone who does not believe, in the first place, in right and wrong, in ethical monotheism. They are bound for hell in any case.

This principle is shown again in the second reading: one has both a right and a duty to point out when a fellow Christian has sinned, against us or against another. If he (or she) does not accept this and seek atonement and reconciliation, he has, by this, demonstrated he is not a Christian and not a brother. He is “a heathen.”

A second common distortion is also revealed by the second reading. The last verse is often misquoted as “wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” And this is used to stress the need for community over against the individual conscience, and so demand conformity. 

But the original is “two,” then “two or three.” If “one” is excluded from God’s presence, so too is any group larger than three. The ideal unit imagined is something the size of a couple or family, not even a typical church congregation. 

Accepting the authority of the latter is simply the ad populam fallacy. If a larger group automatically has more authority than a smaller group, Christianity itself is disproven.

The point is the presence of love; which necessarily requires more than one, as in the Trinity. 

Hence too no doubt the reference to a fellow Christian at the beginning of the passage, and in general,  as “brother.” The reference is to brotherly love, filos.

Whoever has such love is your brother. Whoever does not, is not.

What Rough Beast?

 

It seems clear to me that our contemporary fear of “judgementalism” comes from the secular culture, and owes nothing to Church teaching, or the Bible, or traditional Judeo-Christian morality. It traces back to the “do your own thing” popular culture of the 1960s; before that to such figures as Marcuse, Freud, and before them Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx. 

Jesus himself had no problems with judging the moneychangers, 

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

or the scribes and Pharisees, 

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

or those who mislead or miseducate children. 

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

He judges the living and the dead, and divides humanity into sheep and goats.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”

Is this peculiar to him? Is it only he who is competent to judge, being God incarnate? No; John the Baptist, “the greatest born of women,” also has no trouble condemning the Sadducees and Pharisees, 

“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’”

or judging the acts of Herod Antipas. 

“For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’”

And in this, he is doing the same divine work as all the prophets of the Old Testament: issuing a warning to those who are on the wrong path.

“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.’”

If we lose this, we lose the ethical essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I see our contemporary refusal to make moral judgments leading to the destruction of a growing number of souls; and in the end the destruction of society at large. As W.B. Yeats put it, we are living in a time in which, increasingly,

"The best lack all conviction,

While the worst are full of passionate intensity."

This is what happens when we refuse the call to "put on the full armour of God." This is what comes whne we refuse Jonah's commission.