• He never says they are unqualified
• The tell is that he throws out his own verdict too
• “Man’s day” is a date in a diary
• What a steward is for
• Who this lands on
• Eleven years in the ringing order
• The promise is in the future tense
• The Church keeps its own date
• Where this leaves us

Begin with the last sentence of the Lesson, because everything before it is the argument for it.

Therefore judge not before the time; until the Lord come.

Read that as an instruction about manners and you will get it wrong within a verse. It sounds, at first hearing, like a request to be kinder—to hold off, to give somebody the benefit of the doubt, to be slower with our opinions of one another. That is a decent sentiment and it is not what Paul has written. Judge not before the time is not a request for charity. It is a ruling about jurisdiction and hour, and Paul has spent four verses building it.

Judge not before the time is the conclusion of an argument rather than the opening of a plea. Take the four verses in order and the construction is plain.

Start with what he does not say, because that is where the whole thing turns.

He never says they are unqualified

Paul is being assessed by the Corinthians. That is the situation behind this Lesson: a congregation has been weighing him up, comparing him with other preachers, and returning findings about him. He has every ordinary reason to tell them they have no business doing it.

He does not. Not once in these five verses does he say the Corinthians are unqualified, or ignorant, or too junior, or too compromised to have an opinion about him. He does not attack the court at all. He objects to the date: judge not before the time. The Latin is nolite ante tempus judicare—do not judge ahead of the hour—and the objection sits entirely in those two words.

That is a strange way to answer a charge, and it is worth sitting with how strange it is. The natural move, when a room is weighing you, is to say the room is not fit to weigh you. Judge not before the time makes no such claim. It concedes that there will be a judgment, concedes that it will be thorough, and disputes only when it is due. Judge not before the time is an objection to the listing, and to nothing else.

Keep hold of that, because it is the difference between this Lesson and a plea for tolerance. Judge not before the time does not lower the bar. It moves the hearing.

The tell is that he throws out his own verdict too

Here is the sentence that proves he means it, and it is the one that almost never gets quoted.

But to me it is a very small thing to be judged by you, or by man’s day; but neither do I judge my own self.

Stop at neither do I judge my own self. A man who simply wanted to escape a bad verdict would not also throw out the one verdict he could guarantee in his own favour. If Paul’s aim were to clear himself, his own assessment is the single most useful instrument available to him, and he discards it in the same breath as theirs. Judge not before the time applies to him as forcefully as it applies to them. He is not carving out an exception for himself.

And he presses it further in the next verse, which is where the argument becomes airtight. For I am not conscious to myself of any thing, yet am I not hereby justified. He is saying that his own clear record—no charge he knows of, nothing on his own account against himself—still does not acquit him. A clear record kept by the man himself is not a judgment either. It is an opinion held by an interested party, delivered early.

Judge not before the time therefore has two objects in this Lesson and not one. The Corinthians are told to stop, and so is Paul.

That is the whole tell. Judge not before the time is not a cover he is holding in front of himself, because he has just put down the one weapon that would have worked. It is a claim about what o’clock it is, and he applies it in both directions without flinching. Judge not before the time costs him something, and that is the proof that he means it.

He that judgeth me, is the Lord—and until that hour, the file is open. Not favourable. Not unfavourable. Open.

“Man’s day” is a date in a diary

One more thing about the wording, and then we can put the Lesson down and use it.

That odd phrase in verse three, man’s day, is not a stray idiom. The Latin is ab humano die—literally a human day—and the Douay keeps the strangeness rather than smoothing it into human judgment. Paul is setting one day against another. There is a human day, on which men convene and reach findings, and there is the day the next clause names, until the Lord come, which has not arrived.

So the whole passage sorts itself by calendar rather than by rank. Judge not before the time is a scheduling objection made by a man who is perfectly content to be tried, and who has simply read the docket and found that the case is not on it. Judge not before the time is what a man says when the trial is not his difficulty and the diary is.

Which means the Corinthians are not being told they are wicked for having views. They are being told they have convened early, and that a session held ahead of the hour produces nothing binding no matter how carefully it is conducted. Judge not before the time is addressed to careful people as much as to careless ones.

What a steward is for

Go back to how the Lesson opens, because Paul has chosen his own job title with care.

Ministers of Christ, and the dispensers of the mysteries of God. Then: Here now it is required among the dispensers, that a man be found faithful. A dispenser—a steward—is somebody trusted with what belongs to another and handing it out on the owner’s behalf. And a steward’s whole existence is bounded by a term. He is appointed, he serves, and at the end of it the owner comes back and the books are opened.

We sat with exactly that arrangement on the fourth of last month, in faithful over a few things, where the reckoning is the last scene of the parable and not the first. Not one servant in that story is settled with halfway through. Judge not before the time is Paul saying that he is mid-term, that the owner has not returned, and that the accounts cannot be closed by the other servants while the term is still running.

That changes the word faithful. It is not a rating. It is a description of somebody still holding something that is not his, who has not yet handed it back. Judge not before the time and found faithful are the same idea from two ends: the verdict comes at the handover, and the handover has not happened. Judge not before the time is what keeps the steward’s term open, and it is also his limit.

Who this lands on

Here is the harm, and the Lesson has already handed us the tools to take it apart.

There is a use of judgment inside Christianity that is not a hearing at all. It is a second sitting, convened privately, on a case that has already been through the one court that was actually constituted—and it reaches a finding that goes into no minute book, gets no review, and is never obliged to be revisited. The person concerned is not present. There is no listed date, and there is no listed date for reconsidering it either. Judge not before the time is the sentence that unmakes it.

I am naming who that lands on hardest. People who have been to prison, and people who carry a conviction behind them into every room they walk into afterwards. The sentence handed down by the actual court had a length. The one handed down afterwards by the congregation, quietly, does not—because it was never scheduled in the first place, and a session that was never listed cannot be adjourned. Judge not before the time was written for exactly that gap.

Weigh that habit by what it grows, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. Christianity has been running informal tribunals of this kind for a very long time. It grows parishes where a man may be welcomed at the door and never asked to read. It grows the practice of telling somebody’s history to a third person as a kindness, so that they will know. And it grows people who stop coming, which the parish then reads as proof that the finding was correct.

Paul’s ruling cuts straight through it. Judge not before the time does not say the Corinthians got the facts wrong. It says the sitting is invalid because of when it was held, and that is a much harder thing to argue with than a plea about the evidence. The findings of that private tribunal may be entirely accurate about what a person once did. They are still delivered ahead of the hour, by people Paul says are not the bench, and judge not before the time voids them on both counts.

Judge not before the time is not asking a parish to be gentler about the man it will not let read. It is telling that parish the meeting never had standing.

Two Sundays’ worth of care here, because this argument is easy to hear as something it is not.

This is not a claim that nothing anyone does matters, and it is not a request that anybody who has been hurt should keep quiet or wait. Paul does not abolish the judgment; he dates it. Harm done is real, naming it is right, and a person who was injured is not being asked to hold their tongue until the Lord comes. What judge not before the time removes is the church’s licence to hold its own unlisted session on a person’s soul and standing, and to treat its verdict as final. Those are different things and the Lesson only touches the second.

The thirteenth of this month sat near this and did not say it. That day we were with Paul’s he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord, in glory in the lord, and the question there was about self-commendation—who may vouch for you. This morning is about timing—when anyone may rule on you at all. A room can get the first exactly right, refusing every self-recommendation, and still convene on Tuesday.

And the sixteenth is nearer still. On that day we asked whether help must wait until a person is finished, in the god of all comfort, and the answer was that the credential is receipt rather than resolution. That was about who may give. Today is about who may rule, and the two run on different tracks. A congregation can be generous with its hands on Wednesday and hold court on Thursday.

Eleven years in the ringing order

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There is a story sometimes told of a man who had rung the tenor bell at a country church for eleven years and who, over one long winter, stopped being able to say that he believed any of it.

He did not make a scene about it. He went to the tower captain on a practice night, in the ringing chamber with the stove going and the coats on their hooks, and said he thought he had better come off the band, because it did not seem right to be pulling a rope for something he could no longer say out loud. He expected the conversation to be settled there. He had, in his own head, already returned the finding.

What happened was that the tower captain listened, said that was a hard winter to have, and then chalked up the practice night on the slate with the ringing order on it exactly as it had always stood, tenor last, his name where it had been for eleven years. No meeting was held. The question of whether he still counted was simply never put to the tower, and because it was never put, it was never answered.

He rang through January. He rang through the following winter. He has still not started believing again, so far as anyone there knows.

Three things I want to be honest about. He has never told the priest. Not one person in that tower has ever asked him why. And the man himself would not describe any of this as having been resolved, because it has not been.

I am not going to tell you it turned into a conversion. The tower did one thing and one thing only, which was to decline to settle a question early—and that is judge not before the time carried out by a piece of chalk. He was not readmitted, because he was never put out. Judge not before the time, done properly, leaves nothing to be forgiven afterwards.

The promise is in the future tense

Now the Gospel, briefly, because it is doing the same work in a different register.

Yesterday we read this passage on the Ember Saturday and the weight there fell on the low ground—on who exactly the levelling is addressed to, and on the fact that every valley shall be filled is spoken to the people at the bottom. That is the passage’s own first claim and it stands.

This morning I want a smaller thing about the same sentence, and it is a matter of grammar. Every verb in the promise is future. Shall be filled. Shall be brought low. Shall be made straight.

All flesh shall see the salvation of God—shall see. Not sees, not has seen. Luke has John quoting Isaias in a tense that puts the entire thing out ahead, which is judge not before the time arriving from the prophets rather than from Paul.

So the Gospel and the Lesson agree, and they agree on the clock. Isaias describes a country that has not been levelled yet, and Paul describes a court that has not sat yet. Judge not before the time is what you get when you take the future tense of that promise seriously enough to stop pretending the results are in. Judge not before the time and shall be filled run in the same tense.

And the Gospel does something worth marking with all those officials in the first verse—the emperor, the governor, the tetrarchs, the high priests. It names them, dates itself by them, and then walks straight past every one of them out to a man in the desert. It does not return a finding on any of them. It simply notes what year it was and goes where it is going.

The Church keeps its own date

One last thing, and it is about this morning rather than about the Lesson.

Consider what this liturgy is doing today. It is four days out. It knows precisely what is coming. The Collect begs God to delay not, the Alleluia begs Him to come and delay not, and the whole room would happily have the feast now. And the Church still puts the violet on, still leaves the Gloria folded up, and still calls this the Fourth Sunday of Advent rather than something warmer.

That is not the Church being coy. It is the Church doing to itself what Paul does to the Corinthians. Judge not before the time is easy to preach at other people’s opinions and much harder to apply to a season you are impatient with. This liturgy applies it to its own calendar, four days from the thing it most wants, and it does not jump.

If a Church can wait four days for a feast it is certain of, a congregation can wait for a verdict it has not been given the date of. Judge not before the time is not asked of us as an unusual discipline. It is asked of us as the ordinary practice of a body that has spent four Sundays refusing to open its own present early. Judge not before the time is what Advent is, applied to people.

Where this leaves us

So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room.

Somewhere in your head there is a file on somebody, closed. Perhaps on a person in your family, perhaps on somebody at work, perhaps on somebody who once did something to you and has not been allowed to be anything else since. Paul is not asking you to change the finding. He is telling you the sitting was unlisted, and that judge not before the time voids it whether the facts in it were right or wrong.

And there is very likely a second file, and your own name is on it. That is the one Paul deals with first, and it is the one this Lesson is strangest about. Neither do I judge my own self. Your own worst assessment of yourself is not the truth about you either. It is an early verdict, returned by an interested party, in a session that was never convened.

Judge not before the time covers that file as well, and Paul put it first on purpose.

The Church will keep this violet on for four more days and then it will sing. Until then: judge not before the time, on other people, and judge not before the time on yourself, and let the hour that is actually coming do its own work when it gets here.

↑ The order resumes below.