Every era has its own moral signature, a set of phrases that capture the spirit of the age. In ours, few maxims are wielded with more confidence and finality than “Do not judge.”
But Jesus said, ‘Do not judge.’ It’s literally the one thing everyone knows he said. But what does he mean by judgment?
A Paradox of Judgement
The phrase “do not judge” has been scrubbed of its original context and transformed into the unofficial motto of a therapeutic culture. It has become a cudgel to silence dissent, a diplomatic immunity card for the self.
Yet, at the same time, we live in an era of relentless, hair-trigger judgment. Our social media feeds are vast, churning engines of condemnation, where strangers are tried and sentenced in minutes for a clumsy phrase or a political disagreement. We cancel, we de-platform, we sort the world into the enlightened and the deplorable.
We are caught in a bizarre paradox: a society that publicly disavows judgment while privately, and digitally, practicing it with a vengeance. We’ve created a world where we are simultaneously expected to have no standards for our friends but impossibly high standards for our enemies. This cognitive dissonance is exhausting.
And it leaves us without the moral vocabulary to navigate the complexities of human life. The question is not whether we will judge. To live is to evaluate, to make distinctions, to choose one path over another. The question is how we can do so with wisdom, humility, and grace. How can we learn to assess the world around us without becoming the very thing we claim to despise: a judgmental jerk?
Perhaps the best place to start is by revisiting the very text our culture so confidently misquotes.
Jesus and Judging Right
A closer look at the text reveals something far more subtle and demanding. Jesus’s warning is not against the act of judgment, but against a specific kind of judgment: the arrogant, self-righteous, hypocritical condemnation that flows from our heart. He immediately follows his mocking analogy: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
This is not a call to moral blindness; it is a call to profound self-awareness. The plank-and-speck analogy is an illustration of what we today call projection. In a nutshell, we often condemn most fiercely in others the very faults we cannot face in ourselves. The man obsessed with his neighbor’s cockiness is often blind to his own towering pride. The woman who whispers about a coworker’s gossip is often the central node of the office rumor mill.
Jesus’s point is that our judgment is tainted, our vision hopelessly obscured by the massive planks of our own unexamined flaws.
The first and most urgent task is not to critique the world, but to engage in the painful, humbling work of self-excavation. You must perform surgery on your own eye before you can ever hope to offer aid to another.
Surpassing the Righteousness of the Pharisees
To understand the kind of moral vision Jesus is proposing, we must look to his most frequent foils: the Pharisees. “For I tell you,” he says, “that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The righteousness Jesus calls for is not one of degree, but of kind. The Pharisees were very good at maintaining their relationship with God, terrible at looking at other Jews with anything but scorn. To surpass the Pharisees the goal was not to work harder at our relationship with God, but to take the grace God has given us as the resource to heal the broken relationships in our lives.
True faith, in Jesus’ view, is profoundly relational. It is not about accumulating moral merit. It is about cultivating a heart that is rightly ordered, the heart of a child learning to follow his Father. The righteousness of Jesus, we must never forget, is designed to connect and restore.
This kind of righteousness is infinitely more demanding. Going a day without judging someone for being an idiot is another story.
Get Curious About your Judgment
We need a practical discipline, a habit of mind that allows us to engage our judgmental impulses.
To start, we must learn to treat our judgments not as verdicts about others, but as data about ourselves. This requires a courageous pause. Why am I having this reaction? Is this judgment flowing from a place of wisdom and genuine concern, or is it rooted in my own insecurity, my envy, my unhealed wounds? Maybe in the answer to those questions lies the root of why you are feeling judgmental.
This process is not about finding excuses for harmful behavior. Discernment still requires us to name things that are wrong and to protect ourselves and others from genuine harm. But it changes the goal of the interaction. The aim is no longer to win an argument or to secure a feeling of moral superiority. The aim is to understand, to connect, and, if possible, to help.
The more curious we get about our judgment the more we can see the underlying pull of what makes us judgmental in the first place.
