For six years a friend of mine has been asking me a question I keep not answering.
Tom and I met at church, years ago now. Our children grew up together. During Covid he and his wife spent the best part of three months in Hobart, and we talked most days. We have been on the same Bible reading plan for years, and arguing the whole time — mostly by email, sometimes over lunch at the Grange when I am in Adelaide. It is always the same argument. It has been going long enough that we can pick it up mid-sentence.
Tom wants to know where the line is.
Not out of hardness. He is one of the most careful men I know, and he has been honest with me about what he finds in himself — he once wrote that had he been born in Germany in the 1930s he would have made a ruthless brown-shirt. He does not imagine he is better than anyone. But he cannot accept that we are left with nothing to say. He points at the German church, which failed not by judging but by declining to. He points at Bonhoeffer, who decided that loving the persecuted meant opposing the man persecuting them, and paid for it. And he says — I think he is right — that refusing to judge at all is not humility but a contradiction. The moment I tell you your judging is wrong, I have judged.
So he asks where the line is. And I ask him who is qualified to draw it.
I put it to him two years ago that judges are appointed. They sit because of their training and their experience, and you can have good ones and bad ones. What is our qualification? What fits us to assess another person? He has never given me a satisfying answer, and I have never given him one, and we both know it, and we keep going.
Friday he sent me the question in its sharpest form. How do I extend grace to the wrongdoer without my grace itself becoming an injustice to the person he wronged?
That is a real question. I did not have an answer for it.
My scheduled reading yesterday morning was Matthew 9.
It is not a chapter about judging. It is a chapter about a very full day.
A paralysed man is carried in on a mat by his friends. Jesus looks at them, and says to the man on the mat: Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.
And some of the scribes said to themselves, This man is blaspheming.
I have read past that line many times as though it were malice. It isn't. It is the correct reading. If the man standing in front of them is not who he is claiming to be, then blasphemy is precisely what has just happened, and any scribe worth his training would be obliged to say so. They were not being stupid, and they were not being cruel. They were doing their job, and doing it accurately.
Then verse four.
Why do you think evil in your hearts?
Evil. He uses the word. A man's sins have just been mentioned out loud. And the evil Jesus names is not that man's.
So he asks where the line is. And I ask him who is qualified to draw it.
It happens twice more before the chapter is out.
Nine verses on, he walks past a tax booth and says to the man sitting at it, Follow me. Matthew gets up and follows, and that evening there is a meal, and the house fills with tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees ask the disciples: Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?
A fair question, again. Not spite. They are asking why a religious teacher is at that table.
And later in the same chapter, after a man who could not speak is healed and speaks: He casts out demons by the prince of demons.
Three assessments, all of them made by serious men, and every one of them made while, in front of them, somebody was being forgiven, or fed, or healed. The assessments are not wrong about the facts. They are only ever in the wrong place.
The answer to the second one is the verse I stopped at.
Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, and not sacrifice. For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.
He is quoting Hosea. Sacrifice is a system. It can be counted, scheduled, delegated, audited. You can deal with a great deal of sin by sacrifice and never once sit down with anybody. Mercy cannot be done that way. It happens face to face, or it does not happen.
They did not object to what he taught. They objected to who he was eating with.
For years I took the chapel services in the prison. They were good times. The men were under no illusion about what they had done, and no need, in there, to pretend otherwise.
One Sunday a man came in, looked around him, turned on his heel and went out. The door went hard behind him. Something about not staying in the room with him.
He was in for murder. The one he would not sit with had offended against children.
If I am honest, I have a ladder too. And I have never once put myself on the bottom rung.
The chapter does not end with the argument. It ends with him going round the towns and villages, and then this:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
They are only ever in the wrong place.
Harassed and helpless. Not deserving. Not repentant. Not sorted into those worth the trouble and those past it. He looks at a crowd and what he measures is not what they have done, but what has been done to them, and what they are without.
Then he tells the disciples the harvest is plentiful and the labourers few — and in the next breath he calls the twelve and sends them out.
Matthew is on the list. Eight verses after somebody asked why he was eating with a man like that, the man is being sent out to do the same work.
Tom's question is still a good question and I still cannot answer it. I do not know where the line is.
What I noticed yesterday is where the word evil falls in that chapter. Not on the mat. Not at the table. It falls on the men doing the arithmetic. And I do that arithmetic.
I have not stopped assessing people. I have stopped trusting the result.
The same chapter read from the mat rather than the argument: I Know What You Are Thinking. And a companion piece on measuring, and a prison visits room: Measured, and Immeasurable.