Technically the identity of the falling man has never been confirmed. But on the basis of his estimated size and physical characteristics, his restaurant worker attire, and other clues, many suspect him to be one Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef who worked at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor. A documentary on the photo and its subject, The Falling Man, noted the fact that most news sources chose to ignore the "jumpers" and instead preferred to report on the "heroes" who decided to bravely endure the flames rather than "take the easy way out." One interviewee went so far as to suggest that if the jumper was Hernandez, he is currently "burning in hell" for his cowardly act of suicide. As a conservative-Evangelical Christian my first reaction was to reluctantly agree.
After all, I was taught for years that suicide is a sin, regardless of how difficult life may become, and is furthermore the only sin for which a person cannot possibly repent. But then I thought more about it. Exactly how, I wondered, is deciding to remain surrounded by flames in a burning building dozens of stories from the ground any less "suicidal" than deciding to jump from it? I would guess that the odds of surviving a great fall are no worse (possibly even slightly better) than the odds of surviving being consumed with flames and smoke. Is it really a sin to choose the less painful of two forms of almost certain death? The problem confronting the people at the top of the tower that day, after all, was not that life was no longer worth living, but that living was no longer an option.
And there are other possibilities. Footage shows people standing at the very edge of the building, where the floor-to-ceiling windows had been broken out. By the very premise of the teaching that suicide is sin, those people were morally compelled to get away from the deadly smoke and heat, and those openings were likely the only places to do so. But if dozens of panicked, desperate people are pressing forward to get to those openings, it seems plausible that the "jumper" may have actually been pushed over the edge.
Additionally, it may be that for the jumper his leap was a calculated risk. Waiting for firefighters who clearly were not going to climb over a hundred floors of a burning skyscraper and then carry countless hundreds of people back down to their safety, and seeing flames drawing ever closer, he may have reasoned that jumping was the safer bet. Maybe he tried to spread his body flat and create some sort of aerodynamic resistance in an obviously vain effort to "float" to the ground. Maybe he thought someone would try to catch him or otherwise break his fall. In short, jumping may have been an attempt to live rather than die. (An extended clip of the falling man shows him struggling for control, before perhaps passing out.) The important thing to note here is simply this: We do not know, and cannot know, this man's personal character or motivations.
One of the most familiar — and at the same time one of the most misunderstood and abused — statements in all the New Testament is the admonition of Jesus to his disciples: "Judge not, that you be not judged" (Matt. 7:1). Now it is true that for people who have no interest in the knowledge and purposes of God, Jesus' statement has often been taken to mean something like this: "No man can hold me morally accountable in any way." That same basic sentiment has evidently gained traction in the last few decades, as more and more of us are demanding more and more "rights" to engage in behavior once forbidden as sinful. Scripture refers to such an attitude is licentiousness, that of retaining for oneself the right (license) to behave as one pleases. Clearly the sinless Son of God would not condone a licentious mindset. We are not to judge, censure, and condemn others; but if we abandon our spiritual authority to speak the truth in righteousness we fail to honor Christ.
But we in the church have frequently proven ourselves guilty of an "equal and opposite error" (to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis), by interpreting the commandment of Jesus not to judge as a mandate not only to personally repent of sin and hypocrisy, but then... to judge others. How can this be? Well, the idea is that the traditional interpretation is too simplistic. The traditional interpretation holds that Jesus was prohibiting men from arrogating to themselves the role of moral judge, because only God can fulfill that role. By contrast the alternative interpretation says that in the next verses Jesus actually outlined a two-step procedure for properly judging others:
"And why do you at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck for your eye'; and behold, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." (Matt. 7:3-5)In other words we must repent of our own sins, but having done so we can then proceed to zealously judge our fellows in good conscience. The Holman New Testament Commentary, for example, says: "Jesus clearly indicates that taking a speck out of your brother’s eye is the correct thing to do, as long as you have been careful to first remove the log out of your own eye." I personally have problems with such a reading, the main being that Jesus must have been using hyperbole when he said, "Then you will see clearly [to judge others]"— because it contradicts the command to judge not. Whereas the point of the lesson is to refrain from judgment, the bit about removing the plank out of our own eye before presuming to remove the speck from our brother's eye is meant to illustrate how absurd it would be for inherently sinful men to go ahead and judge other inherently sinful men anyway. The "plank" and the "speck" are clues that Jesus is drawing on our sense of humor and perspective to drive home an otherwise serious point. The "plank" (NKJV, "log" or "beam" in other translations) in the eye further calls attention to our severely limited capacity to accurately see into the hearts of individuals.
Now with that said, there is a danger lurking about even in what I have argued to this point. That is, I could easily, in the very process of passing along the teaching of Jesus on judgment, slip into a frame of mind that judges others for their judgmentalism. It appears very difficult, then, to address moral issues without also transgressing the express teaching of Christ. Is there a way to declare the whole counsel of God faithfully without falling under judgment ourselves? I would say there is. First we must be careful to distinguish between sins, which we should condemn, and individual sinners, whom we should never condemn. It is our duty to preach the truth of Scripture — not to convict a man of his sin: That job falls to the Holy Spirit alone. Second, we must be careful to judge ourselves even as we preach. As Paul stated outright,
"If we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged" (1 Cor. 11:31)
