Sermon-I Look Up to Him. I Look Down on Him.

 

Contempt of Hatred (Expressive Head), by Ernest Joseph Bailley, c1792 (Museum of Fine Arts Ghent)

A sermon given during Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Sunday 13th September 2026 (Year A, Proper 19) based on the texts of Romans 14.1-12 and Matthew 18.21-35 and drawing on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together”.

 

“Look at the state of him.”

“She looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.”

“They look like a rather toffee-nosed pair.”

“How on earth does she manage?”

We probably wouldn’t say things like that aloud. But there are all sorts of things going on in our heads in the first few seconds after we meet somebody.

And, as I am often reminded by those closest to me, priests are certainly not immune.

“He loves his lacey vestments.”

“She’s always first to sign up for a procession at St Paul’s and get a photo with the bishop.”

“I wonder how many people they actually get on a Sunday…”

We meet somebody and almost immediately we start to size them up. We notice their clothes, their voice, their manner, their age. We make guesses about their background, their education, their politics, their money, their competence, their character.

And, perhaps underneath all that noticing things about other people, what we are really doing, deep down, is thinking about ourselves.

By making comparisons.

Am I more successful than they are? More intelligent? More attractive? More important? More moral? More devout?

Or perhaps I feel immediately that they are all those things and I am not.

Often when we encounter someone we are instinctively thinking:

Where do I stand in relation to this person?

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it much more starkly:

“From the first moment when a man meets another he is looking for a strategic position he can assume and hold over that person.”

It is an uncomfortable thought.

Bonhoeffer found that even in what people would think were the most devout communities — churches, seminaries — people compared themselves with each other. If I can find something wrong with you, I can feel a little better about me.

At least I don’t behave like that.

At least I understand this scripture.

At least my faith isn’t as weak as theirs.

At least I come to church.

Bonhoeffer describes such thoughts as “self-justification”.

Justification is an old theological word meaning being put right with God — knowing that we are accepted by God, not because we have proved ourselves worthy, but because of what God has done for us in Christ.

Self-justification is what happens when we try to do that job for ourselves. We try to establish our own goodness — by comparing ourselves with somebody else.

Our first reading today is a passage from St Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, written many centuries before Bonhoeffer, but touching on a similar theme.

Paul is addressing faithful Christians from different Gentile and Jewish backgrounds, exploring how they are to live together as part of the same worshipping community.

Some, it appears, felt that Christians could choose what they ate, while others felt it was better to eat only vegetables — perhaps to avoid meat which was not kosher or which had been sacrificed to pagan gods. Some observed particular Jewish feast days; others did not.

Paul avoids getting caught up in a debate about which side is right and instead focuses on another question entirely.

“Who are you to pass judgement on servants of another?”

Who are you to pass judgement on servants of another?

Judging someone, Paul hints, can become a way of exercising control over them — as Bonhoeffer noticed:

“From the first moment when a man meets another he is looking for a strategic position he can assume and hold over that person.”

But that person is not ours to possess or control. They are God’s people. Our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Saint Paul goes on to ask the members of the church in Rome:

“Why do you pass judgement on your brother or sister?”

“For we will all stand before the judgement seat of God,” he says.

Ultimate judgement belongs to God and God alone.

That is not to say that we can’t judge anything. We have to make judgements — choices — all the time. But when we judge others in this way, we are playing God. Seeking to control them. Seeking to make them in our own image through comparison. In doing so we deny their God-given freedom to be the person that God created them to be.

Bonhoeffer describes this constant comparing, condemning and judging as a life of struggle. A struggle that is futile because through the death and resurrection of Christ we have been freed from it.

A freedom — a salvation — which we can begin to see if we choose to look at the world, and at each other, differently.

If we stop seeing each other as objects to dominate or control and instead see each other as brothers and sisters. See each other through Christ.

We do not need to struggle for self-justification by constantly comparing ourselves with others. Because our justification is in Christ.

In our Gospel reading we find Peter in measuring mode:

“Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

How much forgiveness does this person deserve? How many times must I forgive before I have done enough?

Jesus replies by telling a story about someone else in language Peter will understand. Comparing the kingdom of heaven to a king who forgives the debt of a slave who owes him a great deal, with no way of ever paying it back.

Having received the king’s mercy, the slave goes out and meets another who owes him a much smaller amount, seizes him by the throat and demands that he pays what he owes.

And what happens to the slave who has received mercy but refuses to show it?

He finds himself once again imprisoned by the very debt from which he had been set free.

God’s mercy towards us is immeasurable, yet we spend so much of our lives justifying ourselves by measuring how much better or worse everyone else is compared with us.

Jesus says: stop counting.

Forgive seven times? Seventy-seven times? It doesn’t matter what number you choose, because seeing the world in this way is not seeing the reality of the Kingdom Jesus came to reveal.

Our readings this morning remind us that the person standing before us is not simply someone to be compared with, judged or controlled.
It is someone for whom Christ died.

Like each of us.

We do not stand over one another in judgement — but beside one another before God.

It doesn’t mean pretending that everyone is always right. Or remaining silent in the face of cruelty or injustice. The scriptures tell us that. But today they remind us who the judge is — and who we are.

People who have received the gift of God’s mercy and grace through the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

In his book Life Together, Bonhoeffer offers guidance to churches and seminaries on how to counter this instinct to judge another. He calls it, rather gloriously, the “Ministry of holding one’s tongue.” A surprisingly difficult but vital ministry in order to learn to see each other through the eyes of Christ.

Not every judgement that comes to mind needs to be spoken.

Not every comparison made.

When we learn to suppress our desire for self-justification, we allow the other person to exist as God meant them to be.

Not as we would have them.

And when we begin to see another person like this — as a fellow brother or sister who has received the gift of God’s mercy — each meeting, each encounter, Bonhoeffer says, can become an “occasion for joy”.

So perhaps this week, when we meet someone and find ourselves doing what we all do — sizing them up, making comparisons, passing little judgements — when we subconsciously ask:

Where do I stand in relation to this person?

We might remember that the answer is much simpler than we imagine.

Not above or beneath them — but alongside them, before God.

Not: “Look at the state of them.”

But:

Look at them.

A child of God.

A brother or sister in Christ.

An occasion for joy.

Amen.

Image: Contemptof Hatred (Expressive Head), by Ernest Joseph Bailley, c1792 (Museum of FineArts Ghent)