Why? Why, has Jim left us? It’s an impossible question. We’re all perplexed and sad. And dare I say so, we’re at least a little bit cross with him sometimes.

There are no perfectly convincing explanations. We can’t know everything that was in Jim’s mind. But what I want to try to do, is to explain that we can be confident that Jim himself is not suffering – and that he may even be in a better place.

But then I want to try to turn our thoughts away from our sadness, from all the worry and despair of the last few days, and to do what I’m sure Jim would have wanted, which is to start to remember, to savour, happier memories, of Jim at his best.

Nearly 2500 years ago, Socrates, the great Greek philosopher, was condemned to death. He had to drink hemlock, a poison which took some time to work. He was surrounded by his pupils and his friends, who were terribly distressed at what he was going through.

Socrates said this, which I think could well apply to Jim as well.

‘There is great reason to hope that death is a good, for …. either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, …. can be greater than this? . . . What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. . . . The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.’

So said Socrates. [Plato, Apologia Socratis, 40c5f: see https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Apology_(Plato) for translation]

Those of us who are Christians believe that, as St Paul wrote, there is life after death. We are all made of body and spirit: although the body dies, the spirit, our soul, lives on. [See 1 Corinthians 15, especially from v.35].

Other religious beliefs are similar. Buddhists believe in a ‘transmigration of souls’, so we come back again in this earthly life, but perhaps in a different body. There’s that old song: ‘Be kind to your web-footed friends; as a duck may be somebody’s brother ..’

Jim didn’t have a religious faith, so following what Socrates said, he has either just settled down for one last gentle sleep – or he has woken up to a nice surprise, in a blessed place. But there is another, less philosophical, place where Jim certainly lives on, and that’s in our hearts, in the happy memories we have of him.

Sermon for Evensong on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 11th October 2015

Joshua 5:13-6:20; Matt. 11:20-30
In our second lesson tonight, we heard: ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. (Matt. 11:28). These are the first of the so-called ‘Comfortable Words’, ‘comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him’, in the Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer – you’ll find them in your little Prayer Books at p. 252. We use them sometimes in our 8 o’clock traditional-language communion service.
The Comfortable Words are, like a lot of passages in the Book of Common Prayer, a really neat summary of some of the most important passages in the Bible: after ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden’, there is arguably the best-known verse in the whole of the Bible, ‘So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’, John 3:16. Have a look at the other Comfortable Words on p.252 as well.
Huge amounts of meaning and theology are in every one of those passages. But let’s stay with the particular ‘comfortable words’ from our lesson tonight, ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. They are rather a contrast from what Jesus said just before, about being frustrated with the fact that his message had not been listened to in various places, and his ‘deeds of power’ had not been properly taken account of. ‘A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country …’ [Matt. 13].
Jesus threatens that all these places where he has not been properly received will come to a bad end in the Final Judgment. The whole idea of wiping out entire cities is a hallmark of the Old Testament idea of Holy War, an example of which we heard about in our first lesson, the story of the sack of Jericho. This story in Joshua is obviously not a piece of literal military history, but is more symbolic, showing an instance where God has been present, God has revealed himself, has given a revelation.
‘Behold there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship.’

He said, ‘Nay, (No)’; ‘No’ goes with, ‘[Are you] for our adversaries?’ The answer is, no, he’s not. He’s for us. He is, perhaps, an angel of the Lord, some kind of messenger from God.

In the story of the priests and the trumpets, the ark of the Covenant, it was seven priests, seven trumpets, going round the besieged city for seven days. The number seven was regarded as a numinous number, a magic number, in the ancient world. That idea goes back earlier than the Old Testament, for example to the Ugaritic civilisation which flourished from about 6,000 BC as well. It’s all highly symbolic.
‘When ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat.’ And the walls did fall down. We’re not talking about a literal historical account of the fall of Jericho – although Jericho could well have been sacked at the time when the Israelites crossed the Jordan; we just don’t know. The archaeological evidence isn’t conclusive one way or the other, apparently. The real message is that God showed his hand; there had been a revelation.
Today’s Comfortable Words point to a rather different revelation from the one involving the angel’s presence before the battle for Jericho. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. ‘Comfortable’ is a word whose meaning has evolved a bit since 1549 when Cranmer originally drafted the Book of Common Prayer. It really means ‘strengthening’ or ‘encouraging’, from the Latin verb confortare, which comes from the adjective fortis, ‘strong’: so it means to make strong, to strengthen, to build up. ‘I will refresh you.’
So these are words which build you up: these are refreshing words. Strengthening your faith. I also thought about about the invitation to confession which comes a bit earlier in the Communion service. ‘Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort’.
That ‘comfort’ also brings in the idea of a sacrament, a symbol. ‘Take this holy Sacrament to your comfort’. A ‘sacrament’ is what the Catechism in the Prayer Book describes as ‘An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’
‘Take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.’ There is God’s grace around. Just as the captain of the hosts of the Lord, the angel, appeared to Joshua, we may encounter God in all around us.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
‘Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes, …’
Or George Herbert’s hymn,
‘Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see’.

So in the Comfortable Words we are reminded of God, of what Jesus said and how he asked us to bring him into our lives.

Come unto me … Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’
On one level, we can simply read this passage and feel good. What’s not to like about a Christianity whose ‘yoke is easy’ and whose ‘burden is light’? It’s not tough. Church is fun. ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’.

But even as I say these things, and as you hear them, surely they don’t really make sense. Being a Christian may be – and is – full of joy; and in that we meet with fellow Christians and share each other’s burdens, so perhaps those burdens are lighter than they would otherwise have been, if we had not been members of the church together. But nevertheless, following Jesus can still be pretty tough.
Jesus calls upon us to make sacrifices, calling to mind his supreme sacrifice for us. As Godfrey preached this morning, about the rich young ruler, Jesus calls on us to give up our riches, to share with those who have none: to care for our neighbours – even if our neighbours are as strange and alien as Jews were to the Good Samaritan.
Even today, in many places in the world, being a Christian could be life-threatening. Just as, so often, Jesus said things which appear to be contrary – ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first,’ is the quintessential one – so ‘my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ might also seem to be counterintuitive.
Jesus is saying that to follow him involves total commitment and may involve sacrifice of various types. But as St Paul has pointed out in his Letter to the Romans, [chapter 8], however awfully we may suffer, none of it matters.
‘As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long;

We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors

Through him that loved us.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, not life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
That’s why Jesus’ yoke is easy, and his burden light. Ultimately, whatever we have to suffer, He will make comfortable for us. So let us look again at what we have to do, in order to take that yoke upon us, to lift the burden and really follow Jesus. If we do, even if we don’t get the captain of the heavenly host alongside us, God will be there. We will be comforted.

General Synod Election 2015, Diocese of Guildford Hustings, House of Laity

Question 5: What is your view on equal marriage and the church? Specifically would you like to see gay people marry in church? And would you like to see the ordination of married gay people? ” (Kristina Ingate, Guildford Deanery Synod)

Answer by Hugh Bryant:
On the face of it, the traditional church view of marriage, as between a ‘man and a woman’, given that God ‘made them male and female’, might seem to rule out gay marriage, at least in church. I disagree. It seems to me that maleness and femaleness are degrees on a spectrum of sexuality. Few people are in reality wholly male or female: and many people’s sexuality evolves and changes over time. Therefore in a given relationship there may be maleness and femaleness, even if by basic biology the couple are both ostensibly of the same sex. They are both people, both God’s creatures, both welcome in God’s church. We should certainly marry them: and we should certainly welcome gay married ministers. An enthusiastic ‘yes’ to both questions! 
See http://www.cofeguildford.org.uk/about/governance/general-synod/general-synod-election-2015/general-synod-hustings-2015/hustings-q-a—laity for other candidates’ answers. 

Paper delivered at the Elmbridge Multi-Faith Forum, 29th September 2015
I have been asked to talk about this very interesting question, and to set out a Christian perspective on it.
I’m not going to talk in a completely unguided way, if you like, setting out all aspects of freedom of expression, because it seems to me that the context of this meeting is limited to religious belief, the various different religious beliefs, and further that we are examining this question in the light of circumstances where it could be said that freedom of expression has been taken beyond the limits where it begins to offend religious beliefs, and specifically, religious beliefs about blasphemy.
I’m not going to talk in detail about the Human Rights Act and the various legislation restricting free speech, because there’s nothing specifically religious in it. Instead I want to concentrate on what Christianity has to say about freedom of expression.
The real focus in the discussion topic is what we think about blasphemy, or rather, people of one religion saying something publicly which would be blasphemous in another religion – say, the journalists of Charlie Hebdo publishing cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. 
As I understand things, simply showing a picture of the prophet is a form of blasphemy in Islam. Certainly the sort of derogatory cartoons which Charlie Hebdo specialises in – to be fair, against all religions, not just Islam – must be an example of the sort of thing we have in mind here.
There’s no doubt that Moslem people are offended. There’s also no doubt that in certain Moslem countries, the sort of freedom of expression enjoyed by Charlie Hebdo would be a criminal offence. So what is the Christian perspective?
First of all, of course, it’s trite to say that the third Commandment in the Ten Commandments given to Moses, recorded in Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, is ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’: in other words, a prohibition against blasphemy. In that Jesus Christ said that he had come not to abolish the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 5:17), but to fulfil them, this is as much part of Christian belief as it is in the Jewish religion.
But apart from that, I don’t think Jesus said very much about freedom of speech. Of course, He was in general in favour of upholding the secular law – ‘render unto Caesar’ (Mark 12:17) – but otherwise, neither in Judaism nor in Christianity does there appear to be anything corresponding with Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.
Whereas the Human Rights Act upholds a right of freedom of expression, subject to certain limitations, in Judaism and Christianity there is no positive right to freedom of speech, but rather only a prohibition on blasphemy.
I think there is perhaps a slightly difficult area which is relevant to mention in an inter-faith context, which arises where people to some extent ‘appropriate’ God to themselves. They talk about ‘my’ God and ‘your’ God and so on, rather than a God who is a universal creator and sustainer of life.
There is a difficult passage in St John’s gospel (John 14:6) – ‘No-one comes to the Father except through me’ – where on the face of it, Jesus is saying that Christianity is in effect the only authentic religion. From that, there could be an argument that, for example, to lampoon Mohammed is not blasphemous, because Christians might not necessarily believe that Mohammed had any special status or divinity about him.
There are a couple of interesting passages which bear on this, where Jesus is talking about whether or not Christians have to uphold Jewish rules on eating certain foods. To this day, we all know about the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, for example. But Jesus gives Christians permission not to feel obliged to uphold the Jewish customs. 
St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, deals with a refinement of this, where the question arises whether or not it is permitted to eat food which has been cooked as part of a sacrifice to a pagan god. This raises exactly the sort of issues which I expect we will debate tonight. 
In theory, if you eat meat which has been part of a sacrifice to a god that you don’t believe in, the fact that the food has come from the altar shouldn’t bother you at all. But of course, the act of your eating it might well give offence to the people who do believe in the god whose altar bore the sacrifice.
There is a glorious line in Romans 14: ‘One man will have faith enough to eat all kinds of food, while a weaker man eats only vegetables.’ (NEB). Is this St Paul making a slighting reference to vegetarians?
No. The point he is making is that Christians should not belittle, look down on, people whose beliefs lead them to behave slightly differently from themselves. So St Paul certainly teaches that Christians should have respect for people of other faiths; that Jesus’ teaching of love requires us not to offend other people if we can help it.
I suppose that the Christian position comes down ultimately to Jesus’ two main commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbour. The greatest commandment, in Judaism and in Christianity, and I think also in Islam, is to love God: and that obviously entails not blaspheming.
But also, the second great commandment that Jesus gave, was to love our neighbour as ourself. Therefore, even if the god that somebody else believes in is not the God we believe in, our care for our neighbour, our love for our neighbour, should entail that we try to avoid doing anything which might be construed as blasphemous in that other person’s system of belief.
I am somewhat exercised that this train of reasoning has brought me to at least the beginnings of a feeling that Charlie Hebdo was perhaps going further than true Christian belief would allow us to go, and that they were going outside the scope of Jesus’ teaching.
This is some way away from what Voltaire is supposed to have said, namely, ‘I disapprove of what you say: but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If Voltaire did write that, I have to conclude, sadly, that he didn’t get his inspiration from the Bible.

Sermon for Mattins at Harvest Festival, 20th September 2015James 3:13-4:3,7-8
I don’t know whether a modern farmer ever has time to think at all about what I still think of as the miracle of life. Leaving aside my own, rather hopeless, gardening experiments, why is it that, if you have some good seeds and the right soil to plant them in, those seeds will germinate, will spring up and live?
St Paul said, ‘I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.’ (1 Corinthians 3:6). It’s not the work of our eminent seed producers at Tozers down the road at Pyports, and it’s not the knowledge and experience of the farmers who use those seeds, that make a seed spring to life.
That spark of life is a creation process, which goes on every minute of every day in every place. I’m not sure that it qualifies for the description ‘creatio ex nihilo’, creation out of nothing, but it’s certainly an apparent hiatus in the process of evolution. There does seem to be a need for a life-giving force. I’m certainly happy to believe that it must be God at work.
But if we move away from plant life and think about our human world, again, there is clearly a birth process, a moment when, even in what looks ostensibly as having been an all-physical, all-material creation, an embryo suddenly springs to life and grows into a baby. It is said that a successful fertilisation has taken place. But what makes that particular sperm find that particular egg at that particular time, and what gives the spark of life to their coming together? It’s not something that modern science has been able to shed much light on. Again, I’m happy to accept the idea that it is God the creator at work.
Well, so far, so good; we are celebrating today and giving God thanks for our abundance of food. We are only indirectly connected with the farmers of the world, mainly through Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, and sometimes Lidl or Tesco. But it is right that we should give thanks to God for creating and sustaining the agricultural crops which nourish us and keep us alive.
Harvest Festival is an idea which goes back even earlier than Christianity, but that doesn’t make it any less Christian. The pagans gave thanks to their gods, that they recognised as the ultimate creators. We give thanks to our God in the same way, but as Christians we do it acknowledging that our God has been revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
But what happens when it’s not a seed, not an embryo, that we’re talking about, but instead an organisation, a whole way of life, which provides fellowship and support to all its members? I’m talking about the church.
On Thursday I went to the ‘hustings’ at Guildford Cathedral at which the 14 candidates for the four places to represent Guildford Diocese in the House of Laity at General Synod answered questions from the electors, in an intense session, which lasted two hours from 7.30 to 9.30. I should be open and mention to you that, if you didn’t already know this, I am in fact one of those 14 candidates.
Obviously this is not the time or place to go into the detail of what General Synod does, or the various propositions and arguments put forward by the various candidates, including me. The electors are the members of each deanery synod – so in this church, if you are a member of Deanery Synod, then you are an elector.
What I wanted to draw out in this sermon was that the Church of England, and the General Synod as the parliament of the Church, has identified that growth, or revival or renewal, is something which the Church urgently needs. Indeed there are some pessimistic voices among the bishops who are saying that, unless the Church of England grows and revives, it will be extinct in 50 years.
Some of the questions on Thursday night focussed on the question of renewal and the need to grow. ‘How can the General Synod be an agent for change, and how would you do it?’ was the first question which we had to answer.
I had a rather uneasy feeling, partly of course because I only had a couple of minutes to prepare my answer, and partly because I’m not sure whether a relentless search for change, by itself, is what the Church needs. My reflections on harvest, on new life coming into being and growing, made me feel that the spark of life, which God gives, must be at the heart of things.
How is that spark of new life to keep on coming to our church? Does it have to embrace change all the time, or can it be simply a place of faithful worship and good works, looking to God to ‘give the increase’, to use the language of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians?
So it’s very apt that we should have a passage from the Letter of James as our first lesson this morning. The Letter of James is very short. It’s only got five chapters, and in my big Bible it only takes up four pages. But it is a really practical letter to the early church; it could still apply to many issues which we face in church today. Churchwardens might usefully be given it to read when they are first appointed!
The Letter of James may have been written as early as the time of the meeting of the apostles in Jerusalem which agreed that Christianity was for Gentiles as much as for Jews, which was in 48AD, so only a relatively short time after the date of the crucifixion of Jesus in, say, 33AD. In Acts chapter 15 James sums up the argument and shows how it would be in accordance with the Jewish scripture for Gentiles to become part of the Christian community.
He quotes Isaiah 43:
Behold, I will do a new thing; Now it shall spring forth; Shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness,  And rivers in the desert. … Because I give waters in the wilderness  And rivers in the desert,  To give drink to my people, my chosen. .. This people have I formed for myself;  They shall shew forth my praise. But thou hast not called upon me, O Jacob But thou hast been weary of me, O Israel. (Isaiah 43:19-22)

James’ letter has all sorts of practical advice for the new church. Most importantly, it does seem to some extent to modify the teaching – from the same era – in St Paul’s letters, in particular St Paul’s emphasis on ‘justification by faith’. Salvation of one’s soul was given, simply by faith, rather than earned by doing good works.

James is very clear that ‘faith without works is dead.’ Look at chapter 3, beginning at verse 14.
What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?

If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding he give them not those things which are needful to the body, what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, …

This is very much practical religious instruction. There’s nothing in James’ letter about growing the church. It’s all about what the people in the early church should do in order to conform with God’s law. There are echoes of what Jesus says in our second lesson, about the last being first, and the little child being as important as God himself.

James is very tough on rich people, pointing out that their wealth may be only temporary, and certainly of little value in the context of the Final Judgement. James has always been a popular piece of Scripture in poor and developing countries. It’s probably got also a special relevance, as a challenge, for those of us who are fortunate and live in rich countries and in rich parts of those countries.

As we do. James challenges us always to look for that ‘brother or sister who is naked and destitute of daily food’, and to do something to help them. That’s what we’re trying to do today, with our Harvest Festival gifts.

My feeling is that, if our Church is a place where people have faith, where that faith inspires them to good works, then God will give the increase. Of course, for the work of the harvest to be light work, it needs many workers. But I do suggest that the harvest itself is the real priority, not just assembling a bigger workforce

Sermon for Evensong on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 13th September 2015

Exodus 18:13-26; Matthew 7:1-14 
Sometimes you open the newspaper and, as you skim the headlines, you mentally tick off what they say – but, precisely because you feel sure you know what the article is going to say, you don’t bother to read it. For the same sort of reasons, I’m not going to give you a sermon about refugees, or about Syria, or even about Jeremy Corbyn, tonight. You know what I believe about these topics. It’s not that they aren’t very important. But you know what I might say about them. Our Bible lessons tonight have signposted us into a different area.
We tend to think that being too busy is a contemporary disease. In the old days, we might think, life moved at a slower pace. People had more time to think; a better quality of life. 
And then we read this passage from the Book of Exodus – something which is getting on for 3,000 years old – and Moses’ father-in-law Jethro is tackling Moses about organising his time better. He is just too busy. The solution is for Moses to delegate: he should just concentrate on the really difficult cases and leave the mundane disputes for his assistants to decide. Because the business, ‘busyness’, say, is all in the context of being a judge.
Being a judge was a very important thing in ancient Israel. You’ll recall that there is a section of their history recounted in the Book of Judges. The famous judge Deborah, for example. The judges were also the leaders, were kings and queens. They had a double function. The secular jurisdiction, settling disputes between the people, and also, because this was Israel, God’s chosen people, the judges were there to steer the people towards obedience to the One True God, and to steer them away from worshipping the false gods, the Baals, that the Canaanites worshipped.
It might seem quite an odd idea to us, that the most important person in society should be a judge. The Book of Judges is, in almost all respects, a story of the various kings of Israel, how one succeeded another: all the various stories, Samson and Delilah, the battles with the Amalekites, Sodom and Gomorrah: all the highlights of the Israelites’ history. 
In each case the hero of the hour, the king, tackled the unbelief of the Israelites and their tendency to chase after false gods, put them straight, and back into a relationship with the One True God, and then, when you would expect, perhaps, the historical account to say, ‘He reigned – for example, like the Queen – for so many years’, or you might hear that the king had given his name to some magnificent new building, the King Jephtha Memorial Stadium, or something, no, that’s not how the story went.
In the Book of Judges, when a king was established in his new reign, what he did was he judged the people: and it’s recorded in each king’s case how many years he did this judging. It reads almost as though you could substitute the word ‘ruled’ for ‘judged’, but I think that the special significance of the judging was that the main purpose of it was to keep the people faithful to the true religion, the worship of the One True God, and not to go after following other, false, gods.
A rather different type of judging from weighing up the merits of one case against another; but as we see in the first lesson, there certainly was conventional judging involved: so much of it that Moses really needed an assistant. Growing good judges is something which has come to be one of the attributes of the Jewish people over the years. Today, four out of the eleven Supreme Court judges (in what used to be the judicial committee of the House of Lords) are Jewish. There is a terrific judicial tradition in Judaism: in Jewish history, to be a judge is as important as, and sometimes is the same thing as, being a king.
We don’t get much information in our lessons today about how the judges operated or what they were deciding; what sort of disputes, what sort of cases they were involved in. The overriding duty was to uphold the law of Moses, to maintain the most important principle, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,’ and so on; the Shema Israel. The judge is there to judge people’s conduct, to make sure that it complies with the standard, that they maintain their allegiance to the One True God rather than getting sidetracked and following false gods. 
We don’t really have judges that do that sort of thing today. We might say, as preachers in the pulpit, or as good faithful people in the pews, that there are apparently false gods around. People are effectively worshipping other things than God: money, and status, and celebrity, and so on.
But these days there is nobody in an authoritative position, like a judge, who is going to condemn it. Indeed, I think modern people would be pretty resistant to the idea that as a matter of law, somebody could condemn what they had chosen freely for themselves, however misguidedly, as their life-styles.

What about Jesus? What did He say about judging? What we see, in our New Testament lesson, is that on the face of it, Jesus went against the great Jewish judicial tradition. Don’t do it, He said. By whatever standards you mete out justice, you yourselves will be condemned.
One difference, between what the Old Testament judges were doing and what Jesus was talking about, was that the word ‘to judge’ can cover judging something, deciding between the relative merits of two different arguments, and assessing the worth of a person. Judging what someone is as opposed to what they do. ‘I think that so-and-so is rubbish’ is the sort of judging which Jesus is against. Choosing whether one person’s argument is to be preferred as against another argument, is what Moses was doing.
In St Luke’s gospel chapter 18 Jesus brings up the question of judging again, in his parable of the Unjust Judge. A widow keeps on badgering the judge to give her judgment in her favour, and eventually he gives in:
And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.

And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;

Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. (Luke 18:3-5)
‘Avenge’ is translated as ‘give justice to’ in modern Bible translations (such as the NRSV). You can see the wealth of possible meanings this topic of ‘justice’, and the exercise of judging, can have. ‘I demand justice’ often means, ‘I want a judgement in my favour’. It’s difficult to see why this judge is said to be ‘unjust’: literally, κριτής της αδικίας, judge of injustice. 
He is said to be a judge who had no fear of man or God. ‘No fear of man’ implies impartiality, a good thing in a judge. ‘No fear of God’ might imply a lack of principle, in a Jewish context where a judge had to assess the merits of a case against the Law of Moses, that is, the Law of God given to Moses. Today we would say, with Lord Denning, ‘Be ye ever so high, the law is above you’: we speak of, we revere, the rule of law. And that law is man-made: although it may well coincide with the law of Moses. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
Jesus draws the same lesson from the parable of the Unjust Judge as he does in our lesson from St Matthew. Ask, and it shall be given to you – just as the widow found out, by being persistent. But there’s no suggestion that she received a judgement which she didn’t deserve – or to put it another way, there is no reason to think that she received a judgement which was not justified on the merits of the case.
Perhaps the use of the word ‘avenge’ in the King James Version in Luke 18 gives a clue. Remember what St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, quoting Deuteronomy: 
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. (Romans 12:19)
One of the earliest functions of a system of justice was to replace private vendettas. If you had suffered injury or loss, instead of seeking revenge, you sought a remedy in court.
But who is qualified to be a judge? Are you condemning one of parties because they have a slight fault, that you yourself have in spades? I think we are meant to draw the conclusion that, at least where questions of human worth are concerned, only the ‘Judge Eternal, throned in splendour’ can take the case. 
But what about those current concerns? What about refugees, or whether to bomb in Syria, or even whether Jeremy Corbyn is a Good Thing? Who is qualified to judge? And what would the cases for and against say? And if you have managed to get that all in order, would these questions be ones for Moses himself, or for the Judge Eternal, or could you safely leave them to a magistrate?
Let us pray for God’s wisdom, and for the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide us, in all these matters which call for judgement, and for the best judges.