The Judge and the judges

I'm preaching Sunday on Jesus' encounter with the Pharisees, teachers of the Law and the woman caught in adultery; it's the opener of a short series on "God's Scandal". This one is called "The Judges Meet the Judge".

I remembered my first taste of judging! I was probably only 8 or 9 when a family moved into our little town in Southwest Kansas. They weren’t much different from the rest of us; they were just poorer. They moved into an old ramshackle house -- really a shack -- and little by little, to us kids in school, they became the "untouchables." Their kids wore old, maybe dirty clothes; maybe they wore the same ones over and over (like me!). But they were slow in school.... and held back... and we judged and condemned them. We treated them like they were unclean! You couldn’t sit by one of them on the bus; you couldn’t touch their desk or their books; you couldn't even be near them in class. I shudder to think of the awful things we said and did in those early years of our lives. And I cannot imagine what it must have done to their hearts. We judged them and we condemned them as "unworthy".

John Fisher writes, "few activities in life rival the thrill of passing judgment on another human being. I don’t believe I can go a day on God’s green earth without in some way indulging in this forbidden art. It is the particular pastime of the self-righteous to hold court, and I have been long at the bar. For many, judgment and condemnation have become a way of life. The act of mental sentencing is the mind-set most readily available to those who have been neither willing nor prepared to bring their own actions, thoughts and motivations into the light." (Emphasis mine) From: 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me).