At first sight, this verse is just a concrete supplement to the “general golden rule of ethics ": " Don’t do to others what you will not like them to do to you ". But it is necessary to glance more deeply. We don’t want people to judge us, because we don’t trust their judgments: no matter, they can’t puzzle out anything. We do not accept their condemnations, because we consider that they are better not at all in ours. And that is why we proudly refuse their forgivenesses, what also allows us to forgive nobody. So, we judge, condemn, and do not forgive. But Jesus indeed speaks not only about human’s justice and forgiveness, but also about Divine’s. Everything is different here, God has absolutely the right to judge, and this judgment frightens us because the Judge sees us completely. Well here we begin "to dream" about forgiveness, about undeserved mercy. But we have then to recognize the superiority of mercy over justice and on the way we behave towards others. And this means- don’t judge, don’t condemn, forgive.

It is the most difficult commands of Jesus. Going to the Church, most of us understand this exactly as it, by feeling their disinterestedness and their cruelty. And after we get used to, we become "common" Christians, love towards our enemy is replaced by "the unwillingness to hurt him ", we are ready to lead mercy to almsgiving, and we oppose the proposal to lend without restitution to the words of Jesus “be wise as snakes ". Then… we forget that this command is the most difficult to fulfill, we stop aspiring to the inaccessible, we close up ourselves into our blind optimism.

Comparing the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and Luke makes it clear that Luke generally presents it in less detail. Of course, hardly any of the evangelists transmitted Jesus' words verbatim. At that time it was customary to compile the sayings of teachers and preachers, shaping them into a special kind of literary text and sometimes into entire collections. Even taking this fact into account, however, it is obvious that Luke singled out what he considered most important in Jesus' sermon. For the evangelist, the most important thing is the absence of condemnation. “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged”—these are the Savior's words that Luke considers most important in the whole Sermon on the Mount. Why these particular words? Matthew, for example, has many other themes that are no less important.

Yet the absence of condemnation really can be considered a measure of the quality of a person's inner life. This is not about making an assessment, of course, but precisely about condemning. It is entirely natural to assess a person's particular action in a given situation. Condemnation is another matter: it concerns not the action but the person himself. A person thus becomes the judge of another person, although God never appointed him to be such a judge. A person's path, its outcome, and its evaluation are the prerogative of God and God alone. Even if someone is clearly heading straight for the lake of fire, only God can sentence him to that lake.

Any human being can only state the fact that a sinner is moving in that direction. Why, then, do we pronounce judgment so readily where no one has given us the right to do so? Evidently because we do not see the situation as God sees it and do not use the same criteria—not absolute criteria but relative ones. We see a person not in the fullness of the life God has given him, but only in his particular present condition. We apply certain formal criteria, usually moral and religious, to this condition and naturally obtain a completely distorted picture of reality. But this is no surprise: as long as our life is determined not by the breath of life God has given us but by our own nature, nothing else can be expected.

If, however, we live the life of the Kingdom, such a distortion of reality simply cannot occur. If it does occur, it means that we are still far from the Kingdom, as the evangelist bears witness to us.