0
items
$0
Twenty Easy Ways to Raise a Pharisee — Number 1
Tell them that God wants them to be good instead of that God wants to be good to them.
"Inconceivable!”
[pause]
"You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means."
Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
The young man ran to Jesus, knelt before Him, and pleaded, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
A better beginning would be hard to conceive.
Jesus replied, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” (Mark 10:17+18)
Whoa.
The man runs to Jesus, bows before Him, and declares the “goodness” of the Master—and the Savior rebuffs him—challenging him for saying the truest thing he could ever have said.
That this exchange exists in the Gospels explains why we stumble over, bumble through, and—if God is extra-kind—are humbled by our use of the vague, vital word: good.
We tell our children, “Be good.” We tell them that they can be good if they try hard enough. We then tell them that Jesus died because we cannot be good, and His plan worked because He is the only one who is good. Then they hear us cheering “Good boy!” when the puppy goes potty on the Sunday Classifieds instead of the study carpet. There are “good guys” and “bad guys,” even though it is obvious that the good guys are sometimes bad and the bad guys can come through in a pinch and do something unexpectedly “good.”
Good grief!
Could we blame our daughters or sons (should we not, in fact, admire them) if one day they look up in perplexity and—like Inigo Montoya—say, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
That this encounter between Jesus and the rich, young ruler is recorded in the Gospels also demands that we get a relentless grip on the eternal peril of muddying the nature of true goodness—if we wish not to be adversaries of the Gospel and of God.
Widespread, familiar Christian teaching and practice (It has often been true…times change less than we think) is frequently an amalgamation of ideas, perceptions, and influences—a virtual gumbo of notions.
We are products—many of us—more of western civilization, gnostic mysticism, and loosely gathered traditional habits than we are of well-thought, historic Christianity.
The highly unsettling good news of the grace of God through Jesus was a radical disruption to all of the familiar threads of social, philosophical, and religious thought—a scandal, Paul says, to the Jews and cockamamie nonsense to the orderly-thinking Greeks.
And, in general, it is an insult to us all. Horrible for our self-esteem and disrespectful to the upwardly-mobile, go-getter type.
The flesh craves karma:
Do better, gain reward.
The desperate, observant soul (and anyone with a smidgen of self-knowledge) pleads for grace:
Be given everything, do better.
The Pharisee, outside the temple in Luke 18, flamboyantly complimented God that he was blessed to be better than other people.
The ne’er-do-well scoundrel beside him cried out, “God be merciful to me!”
Jesus is not ambiguous about which one went away redeemed.
In our age of moral relativism and logical chaos, it is understandable that even Christians speak with a renewed admiration of civility, natural law, ethics, virtues, etc.. These are concepts well-grounded in western civilization—rooted significantly in Plato, Aristotle, and their buddies.
That whole crowd could have happily hung out at the pub with folks from every works- or merit-based religion, whether sacred or secular (and believe me, the secular is as religious, performance-based, and self-righteous as any fundamentalist).
In God’s creational order and by His common grace, these virtue-principles offer a measure of truth and wisdom; but as a path to hope and freedom, they are not your friends.
Aristotle and the rich, young ruler would have been soul-mates. The elder prodigal son, Pharisees of every age, and adherents to the entire pantheon of world religions could all join comfortably in their good-deeds club, as well.
Aristotle explained, “virtues we acquire by first exercising them, as in the case of other arts. . . .men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players, by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self controlled.”
The anti-gospel of Jesus.
Virtue and pragmatic ethics outwardly manage life better than lawlessness and self-indulgence. It’s true. They don’t get us any closer to new life and hope.
I understand why the attempted revival in recent decades of “Judeo-Christian” values is cheered by Christians and championed by well-meaning men like Bill Bennett; but note his description of the governing principle of his Book of Virtues:
“As Aristotle pointed out. . . We learn to order our souls the same way we learn to do math problems or play baseball well – through practice.”
Pharisees would concur.
Exertive human effort to discipline stronger virtues into our children or to under-gird our families with time-tested, “traditional values”—much like gospel-neutral prayers in the public schools or Ten Commandments carved on public buildings—are (swallow hard) no friend of the grace.
On the contrary, if we learn any thing from the Great Physician, the Pharisees, and eager seekers like the young man of Mark 10:17-18, it is this: the more virtuous a person or a people appear to be, apart from Christ, the more virtuously and violently resistant they will be to the Gospel of Christ.
The young ruler struck the right physical pose, asked for the right thing, and spoke rightly about the Lord—but the Savior perceived that his main goal was to certify his own goodness, not to cry out for the goodness and mercy of the King of Grace.
God doesn’t want us to be good for Him. He wants to be good to us. He wants us to do anything we want and to want beautiful and lovely things. The one who tastes, embraces, and then incurably craves more of the goodness and generosity of God will grow to flourish in every good thing. It is treasure that trains us, not restriction or fear or noble thoughts. We run after—without needing to be told—what we most believe to be of greatest value and delight.
So, the virtue, the wisdom, the behavior will come; but never safely if we begin with them.
Begin with the One Who never stops doing good to His people with all of His heart and with all of His soul (Jeremiah 32:38-41) and does not dwell in temples made with hands, as though He needs anything from us. (Acts 7:48).
God does not need us. He wants us.
He does not need us to do anything. We need Him to do everything…and then He does even more.
Jesus wants to be good to our children. He wants, in a flood of generosity, to give them an alien goodness, to which they contribute nothing, but by which they obtain spectacular, unfading life and the kind of treasure on God’s eternal New Earth, that never rots or rusts and no thief can steal.
If we are kind to our kids and our neighbors, we will help them learn that they are not good—and that catching on to this is very good.
We will point them—like Christ did—to God’s matchless goodness; and we will topple—like Christ did—their dangerous charades of personal virtue.
Yes, the Lord also wants our children (and us) to be and do good; but—like the new birth—the new behavior of a Christian is a gift. . . from God to us—not us to God!
Just as no good works, no self-worth—no cash, check or money-order—even contributes to our salvation; so also nothing but His extravagant generosity—drawing us into a Father’s embrace and flourishing us in His grace—will gradually (and then gloriously) reveal us to be the splendid and—yes—good sons and daughters of the King, that He has happily redeemed us all to be!
* * *
This series of blogposts are being posted in conjunction with Season 2 of the “No Mere Mortals” podcast (this link is to the Apple podcast app, but NMM is also available at Spotify and in other podcast apps). Jump on over to the podcast to listen to Lisa and my conversations on grace-rooted, joy-shaped, self-righteousness-suffocating home life and relationships!
Track along with all that we are doing here at Enjoying Grace Story Co. at Don Shorey’s Instagram.