Read: Romans 2:1-16 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
If we have all sinned equally, then it stands to reason that we are in no place to judge others, or to be mean-spirited about other people’s failings. ‘People who live in glass houses,’ they say, ‘shouldn’t throw stones’.
But the reality of the church is that we are all sinners; and one of the ways in which we sin is that we do judge one another – and we shouldn’t. It was exactly the same for the first readers of Paul’s letter. By the standards of Jewish Christians in Rome, Gentile Christians paid insufficient attention to the holiness of God and to past ways of worshipping; to the Gentile Christians, meanwhile, the Jewish Christians’ focus on their people’s history with God was exclusionary and stuck in the past. Paul’s point is the same to both groups: it doesn’t matter how you sin – whether you sin like a Jew sins or whether you sin like a Gentile sins. What matters is that we all sin, and that, as a consequence, none of us can take the moral high ground over one another.
What went for Paul’s first readers in Rome goes for us, too: whether we are liberal, conservative, traditionalist, modernizer, pew-lover or pew-hater, cheerful or melancholy, we are all sinners. In God’s eyes, not much else matters. It is hence utterly ridiculous for us to persuade ourselves we’re better than the next Christian, or to judge others on the spurious grounds that their sin is somehow a worse one than our own.
If, this Lent, we can remind ourselves that each and every one of us is a sinner; if we can remember that, in our own ways, each and every one of us has fallen short of the glory of God, then we will be spared the mistake of judging one another.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.