Jesus' urgent counsel, "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged," can be paraphrased this way: "Be merciful toward others, so that mercy may also be shown to you." Yet the apparent simplicity of this thought is complicated by the fact that the second part of the saying speaks not of human judgment, but of God's judgment. At the same time, it is clear that in life those who show mercy rarely receive it in return, and even when they do, there is little reason to look here for a direct connection between one person's kindness and the kindness shown to that person by third parties, so to speak.

It is another matter that Jesus does not call His followers to seek any indulgence for themselves. Christians are simply required to remember how deeply tangled worldly life is: relationships, actions, disputes, conflicts, and everything else that fills human existence, and under no circumstances to pass final judgments, still less verdicts, about what we dislike or what at times truly breathes malice and sows destruction. This is not worth doing if only because every person is merely "a reed shaken by the wind," capable of great nobility, great folly, and even desperate madness...

For this reason, the words about the speck and the log follow in today's passage. Jesus is not simply advising us to be more modest or humble, and certainly not to try to convince ourselves that "I am worse than every creature." In His words one hears a simple friendly wish for every listener or reader: evaluate yourself soberly, and do not indulge in self-abasement. More than that, there is a call to action here: there is no need to pick over other people's bones, and no need for self-digging either; nothing is gained that way. Just wash the eye into which something has come from outside, and look at God, at His generous and understanding attitude toward people; imitate Him, and there will be no need to teach anyone, rebuke anyone, or grumble at anyone. What will remain is only love that persuades without words and builds everyone up...

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you..." Here it is fitting to recall an ancient wisdom spoken by Ovid, in order to see how close and at the same time how distant these two worlds are: enlightened, golden antiquity and the small community of the early Christian Church standing opposite it. "Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo." "The drop hollows the stone not by force, but by falling often." It would seem that this says the same thing: constancy in seeking. It sounds like a call not to despair when no result is visible, but to dare further. Yes, the similarity is obvious... But if we look at this picture a little more closely, we notice that there is something dead in this stone, some indifference to the drop, and a cold static quality shows through the whole situation.

Christianity is entirely different. The main thing that distinguishes Christ's words is the presence in them of a living answer. Yes, this too is a call to constancy in seeking, but in a completely different way: it will be opened to you, it will be given to you... What can a drop expect from a stone? Nothing, only dead silence. Here, however, we have a living answer. There is a striking expression: if a person, praying to God, does not expect an answer, he is simply an atheist. And sometimes someone hopes to get through to God with monotonous prayers, morning and evening, which, like that same drop, resemble one another day after day, performed without creativity and, most importantly, without dialogue... No, the way to Him is only dialogue, only creativity, only standing over the abyss.

Jesus' words about judgment could be seen as a continuation of a tradition going back to one of Israel's great teachers, Hillel, who said: do not judge your neighbor until you yourself have been in his place. Other teachers also thought that a righteous person should not rush to condemn his neighbor, even when, at least at first glance, there is something for which to condemn him. Jesus, however, appears to modify Hillel's saying somewhat: He says that before condemning a neighbor's sins, one must see one's own sin.

Of course, this counsel also has a spiritual and practical meaning: until you understand how to fight your own sins, you will not understand how to help your neighbor fight his. And it was understood as a matter of course that it made sense to look closely at a neighbor's sins only in order to help the neighbor get free of them. After all, in the Judaism of the Second Temple period, the generally accepted view of the Torah was that it was a guide on the path of righteousness and a means of fighting sin, not a kind of religious club with which to beat the sinner over the head for his sins.

In fact, Jesus calls for great caution in judging a person, not only in the sense of condemning him (no one would have thought of taking upon himself God's prerogative anyway), but in the sense of evaluating him as a sinner or a righteous person. Indeed, in order to give such an evaluation, one would have to know the human heart as only God can know it. Evaluating specific deeds and actions is another matter: anyone who knows the commandments and understands the essence of the matter being evaluated can assess them more or less adequately.

But the question of who is worthy of the Kingdom and salvation, and who is not, is not ours to decide, if only because we ourselves receive this Kingdom not because we are worthy of it. Besides, its story is still far from complete, and so the time for final evaluations has not yet come. And when it does come, in any case, we will not be the ones making them. Therefore our task is not evaluation, but the struggle against the sins that hinder us and our neighbors from walking the path of righteousness, so that we may complete this path in the Kingdom, where each of us will finally be freed from everything that prevents him from living life in its fullness.