on judging...
"This warning, therefore, is highly necessary. Once we have discharged our office--be it public preaching and rebuking or brotherly admonishing, as Christ teaches it in Matthew 18:15-17--we can learn from this warning and get used to tolerating, concealing, and adorning our neighbor's transgressions. If I see something in him that does not please me very much, I should pull back and take a look at myself. There I will find many things which do not please other people either and which I want them to pardon and tolerate. This will soon relieve the itch that tickles itself and enjoys someone else's transgressions... Thus you will be happy to square things with the other person. First you will say: 'Lord, forgive me my debt'; and then you will say to your neighbor: 'If you have sinned against me, or if i have sinned against you, let us forgive each other.' But if you see that he is the kind of coarse person who will not stop unless you rebuke him, then go to him and tell him so by himself, as we have often pointed out on the basis of Matthew 18:15; this may cause him to improve and desist. This should not be called passing judgment on him and condemning him, but admonishing him in a brotherly way to improve. Such admonition should proceed in a fine and peaceable fashion, according to God's commandment. Otherwise, if you are tickled and if you poke fun at your neighbor and ridicule him, you only make him bitter and stubborn against you. By withdrawing your love from him and finding enjoyment in his sin, you become much worse than he and twice as big a sinner. You also fall under the judgment of God by your condemnation of one whom God has not condemned. Thus you load an even heavier judgment on yourself, as Christ warns here, and you deserve even greater condemnation from God...
I shall not discuss the fact that this miserable judging makes you damnable not only on account of the deed itself, but also because the person who does the judging is usually stuck deeper in sin and vices than other people. If he went back and read his own diary and account book, telling how he has lived since his youth, he would hear a story that would make him shudder and that he would like to suppress from other people. Now everyone would like to pretend that he is pious and to forget the whole past and to criticize and condemn some poor man for sinning just once. Such a person brings double trouble on himself...
You do not imagine, do you, that God is unable to spread out an account book before your very nose and to cite not only your transgressions and the sins of your youth, but also your whole life, which you thought was very precious, as the monks think about their cloistered life?...
Thus you see why Christ is speaking out so harshly against this vice and pronouncing such a severe sentence: 'Whoever judges will be judged.' This is as it should be.. By meddling into God's judgment and condemning one whom God has not condemned, you are giving Him just cause to do the same to you in turn. He will condemn you and all your work to hell, in spite of all your piety. He will elevate to a position of honor the neighbor whom you have judged and condemned, even making him a judge over you and having him find ten times as much in you that is damnable as you have found in him. So you have done very well indeed. You have angered and alienated both God and your neighbor. thus you lose both the grace of God and the christian life simultaneously, and you become worse than a heathen who knows nothing about God."
WHEW! Anyone ever hear sermon's like that?
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