NOTES for Мф 7:1-8
Jesus' words about judgment could be considered 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. And other teachers also believed that it was not fitting for a righteous person to hurry to condemn his neighbor, even when there seemed to be something for which to condemn him. Jesus, as we can see, somewhat modifies Hillel's saying: He says that before condemning the sins of one's neighbor, one must see one's own sin. Of course, such advice also has 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 self-evident that it makes sense to look closely at a neighbor's sins only in order to help the neighbor be freed from them: the generally accepted understanding in Judaism of the Second Temple period was that the Torah was a guide on the path of righteousness and a means of fighting sin, not a kind of religious club with which to beat a sinner over the head for his sins. In fact, Jesus too calls us to be very careful when it comes to judging a person, not only in the sense of condemning him, since taking God's prerogative on oneself would not have occurred to anyone anyway, but in the sense of evaluating him as sinner or righteous person. Indeed, to give such an evaluation one must know the human heart as only God can know it. It is another matter to evaluate specific deeds and actions: everyone who knows the commandments and understands well 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 for us to decide, if only because we ourselves receive this Kingdom not at all because we are worthy of it. Besides, its history is still far from complete, and therefore the time for final evaluations has not yet come. And when it does come, in any case it will not be we who give them. Therefore our task is not evaluations, but the struggle against those sins that prevent 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.