faith writes:
In the same chapter of Luke 6 and in the very same discourse as the famous "judge not" statement, Jesus talks about having the discernment to see the difference between good people and evil people (Luke 6:43-45). He compares them to trees. Good trees, he says, produce good fruit and bad trees produce bad fruit. The call to differentiate good from evil is to judge, to discern, correctly.
I've always thought that this was a very odd thing for Jesus to say. After all, he was a carpenter, so I should have expected him to think of good and bad trees chiefly in terms of the quality and usefulness of their wood rather than of the edibility of their fruit.