I drove across South London with my son Silas last night.

I did not distinguish myself on the journey.

Before we had got through Brixton it had become apparent to me that everyone else out driving that evening was an idiot; was thoughtless; was incompetent; was to be derided.

I’m a terrible judge and cars are terrible places for the calling down of judgement, a sealed box where we cannot be heard but where we often forget we can be seen, in my case as a bald, red-faced, middle-aged man in his Mum’s old Renault Clio, getting steadily angrier as the traffic gets steadily worse.

But it’s not just people’s driving I judge.  I judge people’s taste.  I judge people’s behavior.

Over the last few months, we have positively luxuriated in judging each other.

Who has guests in their house?  Who sits too close to whom in the park?  Who clearly hates the NHS and has it in for nurses?

This sort of thing seldom ends well.

Our readings today have a lot to say about judgement and I want to look briefly at three questions arising from those readings

1. Matthew 18, 21-35: Who judges?

2. Romans 14, 1-12: Who is judged?

3. Psalm 103, 1-13: What is God’s judgement?

Peter’s question in Matthew 18, 21, ‘how often should I forgive?’ is a request for the power to judge. Like us the disciples did like a bit of judging, not least of each other: “who shall be the greatest?”, they ask in Matthew 18, 1.

Jesus’s response, in the story he tells Peter, sets out, very clearly, the ever present dangers of judgement. And, crucially, the story lays out the alternative outcomes of judgement and contrasts the two.

The first proposed outcome of judgement in this story is unspeakable: slavery, imprisonment and the destruction of family. Judgment is dangerous.  Left to us, unforgiving judgement becomes a tool for oppression and the abuse of power.

But forgiveness, the second possible outcome, mitigates the brutality attendant on judgement.  Forgiveness sets free and forgiveness offers redemption and renewal.

Yet forgiveness is not the opposite of judgement.  It is an outcome, chosen actively and explicitly by the judge.

And the answer to Peter’s question, when do we forgive? How often do we forgive? Seventy times seven times. Or, in other words: always.

I wonder if this wasn’t a little disappointing to Peter who seems to have wanted to set a limit in forgiveness so he could get properly stuck into the business of judging.

He was like us.  We are always judging.  We are always being required to respond to those who have hurt us, slighted us or done harm; and every hurt, slight and harm necessitates judgment.  But contrary to Peter’s expectation (hope), there is no convenient limit beyond which we are free to judge rather than forgive.  The required outcome of our judgement is always to show mercy.

There is no limit to Gods forgiveness – and there must be no limit to ours.

So, to answer the first question: “Who judges?” We do.

And the requirement of our judgement is that it should be merciful.

Mercy is in our gift. It is our duty and our responsibility.

The thing is, though, that just as we are endlessly judging, we learn from Paul, writing to his friends in Romans 14, 1-12, that we are also judged and the answer to our second question is the same as the first.

Who is judged? We are

All of us.  “We will all stand before the judgement seat of God.”

So how does our being judged affect the judgements we are required to make?

I said earlier that we all love to judge.  Paul saw that at work in the Roman church, whose members judged each other for what they ate, for how they passed their days; in other words, they judged each other for the sake of quarrelling over opinions.

Paul could hardly be clearer about the irrelevance of these arguments over petty issues, firstly precisely because they are petty and meaningless.

But secondly because there is no one to name sin but God.  It is to his judgement that we will come and the only thing we should be concerned about then is the question of our own life.  Has it been lived to God?

We are all accountable to God for ourselves. We are all judged.

And if we look back to Matthew’s Gospel we see that we are judged for one thing in particular, and it is not what we commonly conceive of as “our sins”.  We are judged for unjust judgement.  For lack of mercy. And to be judged for that is a fearful thing.

Which brings us to our third question: what is God’s judgement?

We learn two things in Psalm 103, 1-13.  (Of course, we actually learn a lot more, but I’m going to focus on two.)

First, we learn that God forgives. God’s judgement is merciful.  There is no more glorious expression of the limitless grace of God than this Psalm, in which our sins are forgiven, our infirmities healed, our lives redeemed and our youth renewed.

But second, we learn that even so, God does judge: God executes righteousness and judgement for all who are oppressed. And it is clear that judgement for the oppressed is judgement on their oppressors.

And since we know God is not an oppressor, that means us.

So, what does oppression look like?

In simple, low-level terms, it looks like what Paul describes in Romans: it looks like judging people for whether they eat vegetables.  It looks like judgement wrongly applied.  It looks like the relentless micro-aggressions of judgement exercised where we have no right to judge,  It looks like judgement as a form of coercion.  It looks like what the Church has often done

We spend, have spent, far too much time worrying about vegetables and other things on which the scriptures, and Jesus himself, has next to nothing to say.  These have often been questions around sexuality and gender, relationships and race, which we have used historically to maintain control by oppressing certain groups of our brothers and sisters, including, to our shame, our brothers and sisters in Christ.

And while we’ve been worrying about these things, often no more than the simple question of who’s loving whom, we’ve spent far too little time worrying about the thing which rings out from practically every page of the Bible and consistently in Jesus’ own teaching, which is justice for the oppressed. Or, if you prefer, the very people we are marginalizing and othering by our judgement.

This psalm tells us what will happen to the oppressed: righteousness and judgement will be executed for them. In a passage dripping with mercy, there is a warning here: make sure you’re on the right side. Make sure you stand with those who have been silenced.  Make sure you stand with those whose protests are met with terror.  Make sure you stand with those whose debtors we are for centuries of violence.

God’s side is the side of mercy, yes, but God’s side is the side of the oppressed and that has to be our side too – away from the pettiness of regulation, away from the vindictive defence of self, away from the fear of difference.

Because this is what God is like.

God calls us to acknowledge that every interaction with every fellow human involves a judgement, a measurement of the person facing us; and that if they are not merciful, those judgements, those measurements, are the enactment of oppression.

God reminds us that we are ourselves judged, and that it is not the small stuff we should be concerned about as we come before them.

And God declares that their judgement will execute righteousness and justice for the oppressed, and that if we are to experience their mercy, we are to do the same.

This is how God judges us: on the quality of our mercy. And the quality of God’s mercy is as the Psalmist sings:

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. He will not always accuse us, neither will he keep his anger for ever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he set our sins from us. As a father has compassion on his children,  so is the Lord merciful towards those who fear him.

Psalm 103, 8-13

Amen

This was the first time I preached at St Olave Hart Street after public worship became possible again following months of online services.