Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
Standing before a judge, preparing to be tried for war crimes, Saddam Hussein claimed he was still the president of Iraq. He was utterly defiant, completely unrepentant. At the mention of his invasion of Kuwait, he referred to the people of that country as “dogs.” He challenged the legitimacy of the proceedings and refused to sign court documents. It was fascinating. A human being so utterly bad is utterly intriguing.
Friday’s Register-Guard Ticket section had an article about comic-book villains like Dr. Octopus in the second Spider Man movie. These larger-than-life evil doers are half the fun in some fantasy stories. We are intrigued and captivated by figures of evil. And even the “heroes” of our fantasies can be less than virtuous. The “anti-hero” is a common character in today’s fiction and film. Marlon Brando’s famous Godfather character is just one example. The heroine of “Kill Bill” is in the same vein. In the recent science fiction movie, “The Chronicles of Riddick,” a character named Aereon says, “In normal times, evil should be fought by good, but in times like this, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil.” Richard Riddick, that other “kind of evil,” fights the evil Necromongers motivated purely by a selfish desire for revenge. Our entertainment is flooded with figures like these.
Our news and movies are filled with fascinating evil characters because, on the whole, we do not understand the sixth fruit of the Spirit. We settle for interesting characterizations of badness because we have too little grasp on what goodness looks like. Even among us Christians, there is serious stunting of the growth of goodness, so much so that we barely know what it is. We suppose ourselves to be good people, but we have hardly any idea what that means.
Jesus confronts religious people who think they are good. He challenged the supposed goodness of the Pharisees by pointing out that their words about His work and His Spirit proved that their hearts were really bad rather than good. In verse 35 he pictures them as trees and gives them the option of making the tree good or making the tree bad. Only a good tree will produce good fruit – only a good person will speak good words. A bad tree – a bad person – will only produce that which is bad.
How, though, do you make the tree good? How do people – how do you and I – become good? In other words, what does it take to cultivate the sixth fruit? What makes goodness grow in us? Part of the problem we have in answering that question is our own Christian theology of salvation.
One of the fundamental truths of the Bible is that, ultimately, no human being, save the Lord Jesus Christ, is good. Hero or Villain, Pharisee or Apostle, God’s Word teaches us that we are all sinners. Romans 3:23, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Psalm 14:3, “there is no one who does good, not even one.”
Jesus cleverly rubbed our nose in that truth about our lack of goodness at the same time pointing to His own divinity. In Luke 18:18 a ruler addresses Jesus as “Good teacher.” Jesus responds, “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” Only God is good. The only man who is good is the God-Man, Jesus Christ. No one else has any real goodness.
The truth of universal sinfulness is important. Despite all the evil we see both on the screen and in reality, a great many people are inclined to believe some sort of sappy nonsense about the innate goodness of every human being. The Bible hauls us up short when we start to think that way, reminding us that it’s nothing but baloney. We are all sinners, guilty as hell – to use a little theological language. Our only hope is a goodness which comes from outside us, goodness which is a gift, the goodness which comes as the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
So let us focus in on one more important truth. Despite the fact that we are sinners, despite our universal, absolutely pervasive badness, Jesus Christ died for us – Romans 5:8. And by the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has arranged to make us what we are not. He has provided a way, purely by grace, to make the tree good as Jesus asked. By the Cross and the Empty Tomb, God gives us a goodness we cannot possibly achieve on our own. By ourselves, we are bad. In Christ we are miraculously made good.
Yet there still seems to be a shortage of goodness, even among Christians, even in the Church, where all the trees are supposed to be good and bearing good fruit. Some of you can attest, as I will, that – not in this congregation of course – it is among Christians that you can find some of the nastiest, meanest, baddest people on earth. What’s the problem?
The problem is that we have overemphasized one aspect of God’s gift to us of the goodness of Jesus Christ. All from correct biblical understanding, we believe that we are sinners, we believe that Jesus died and rose so that our sins could be forgiven, and we believe that God now looks at us not in the light of our own bad deeds but in the light of His Son’s good deeds. By the grace of Jesus, God is willing to see us as good when we are not good at all. This is the doctrine of forensic goodness. Like a pardoning judge, God simply declares us to be righteous, even though we are not. And that’s all true. The problem is that we have made it into an excuse, an excuse not to practice goodness, an excuse not to do righteousness. Being forgiven, being pardoned is enough.
You may have seen that bumper sticker which reads, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.” One way to look at that is as an admirable expression of Christian humility, a recognition of the truth about one’s own sinfulness. But it also becomes an excuse for all sorts of imperfections, including lousy driving. “Don’t expect too much from me, because I’m not perfect, just forgiven,” is the tone of the message. “Yes, I may drive too fast, cut you off, and even proffer an insulting hand gesture, but remember ‘I’m not perfect, just forgiven.’”
It’s that little word “just” which is the mistake in the bumper sticker. Christ did not die and rise just to forgive us. His gift of goodness to us was not meant to be just forensic. He never meant to just declare us righteous and leave it at that. No, the message of the sixth fruit of the Spirit, the message of the whole and complete Gospel, is that God in Christ actually means to make the tree good as verse 35 says, to make us good. Yes, yes, yes, we will never be perfect on this side of the kingdom, but you cannot read the Bible carefully without getting the message that we are to be far better than just forgiven. God means to give us real goodness. In Jesus Christ He means to make us good, not just declare us good when we are not.
Which all means that we must be passionately engaged in the business of cultivating goodness, of letting the reality of Christ’s goodness in us bear fruit. So how do we go about it? The first matter is to hold on to the nugget of truth in that forensic doctrine. On our own, we have no hope of becoming good people. Without the grace of Jesus Christ, we will make no progress in goodness. No one can be good without God. So cultivating goodness begins with a daily prayer for both forgiveness and for help in becoming good. To that end, Jesus taught us how to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Forgive us and make us better. That’s what we pray for.
Practicing goodness is also something we strive for. It is humble striving, because we know we have no hope of succeeding apart from grace, but we still strive for goodness. Jesus said to “Make the tree good.” Paul tells us in our Epistle lesson, Ephesians 5:8, “Live as children of light.” In II Peter 1:5 we read “make every effort to add to your faith goodness.” So we do not merely call on God to infuse us with goodness, we strive toward it.
Jesus gave us a glimpse of how to go about striving toward goodness in verse 35 of our text. He says, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him.” That’s it. Somehow we need to build up in us a store of goodness.
One way to store up goodness rather than evil is to address that strange fascination we have with evil characters both in reality and fiction. We need to stem the flood of anti-heroes and morally flawed heroes with some deliberate attention to those characters who exhibit true and whole goodness. That is why Christians through the ages have remembered the lives of other Christians. Saints are not magic. We do not pray to them. We turn to God for help, not to the saints. But we do remember them because they give us a storehouse of images of real goodness. They show us what it’s like for an ordinary human being to become good. They show what it’s like to be like Christ. We should imitate them, because they imitate Jesus.
In I Corinthians 11:1 Paul wrote, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” We are meant to learn from others how to cultivate goodness. Ultimately our teacher is Christ Himself. He is the only perfectly good human who ever lived. But as Paul shows us, Jesus all the time uses the people around us and those who’ve lived before us to provide solid examples of goodness.
You cannot learn to be a follower of Jesus Christ the way you learn to use your new DVD player or cellular phone. You can’t just read the Bible as an instruction manual or work by trial and error. Following Jesus is more like learning to swim than learning to operate a machine. You need an example. You need someone to show you how the strokes are performed. You need to see good form so that you can imitate it.
Let us then be constantly paying attention to the best examples of Christian goodness. What we know of Paul and Peter, of Mary and Martha, should always instruct us. We have the historical examples of saints like Augustine and Francis, Monica and Claire. We have the courage of a Thomas More or a Martin Luther. We have the sacrifice of a Dorothy Day or a Mother Teresa. We have the moral compass of an Abraham Lincoln. They and hundreds more are the gifts of God so you and I can remember them and store up goodness in our hearts. The Covenant Church is remembering missionary martyr Dr. Paul Carlson for that reason. And having seen and heard his widow Lois speak in Minneapolis, Beth and I would say that she is an example as well. God gives us people like these so we can be like them – always remembering that we imitate them because they, like Paul said, have imitated Jesus.
Even our selection of entertainment can focus more on characters who provide us positive examples of goodness. One thing so encouraging about the popularity of “The Lord of the Rings” movies is that they are filled with characters worth imitating. Let me call your attention to just one: Ralph Wood, who will be our Church & Culture speaker in October, says that Sam Gamgee is perhaps the greatest hero of the story. He starts out as a weak, foolish, fearful youngster. But by loyalty to his master and by imitation he becomes a great soul, a good man of courage and uncompromising faithfulness.
Sam is one fictional character definitely worth storing up in your mind and heart. There are others. Consider the love and sacrifice of Babette in “Babette’s Feast” as she gives up a life of ease for herself in order to provide a healing feast for the residents of a tiny Scandinavian village. Remember the bravery, honesty and faithfulness of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” as he defends a black man wrongly accused in Alabama before the recognition of civil rights. There are others, I know. Entertainment doesn’t have to fill us with bad things.
But our examples of goodness are not and should not be all in books and movies, whether they are history or fiction. Part of the purpose of the church is that we are meant to be examples and encouragers for each other as we move together toward the fruit of goodness. Paul was there as a living, breathing example when he first told the Corinthians to imitate him. In I Thessalonians 1 he commended one church for becoming good examples to other Christians. That is how the fruit of goodness grows best. We cultivate the living, breathing help of good Christians around us in order to become good.
So I urge you to have some time, some place in your life when you place yourself in the company of a Christian or Christians worth imitating. Have an arrangement where you regularly listen and speak with another person or a group of people who are trying like you to grow in goodness, to follow Christ. That is how it happens.
Yes, Beth and I celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary this past week. But as the wonderful party you and our daughters gave us reminded us, we didn’t get to this point by ourselves. On our own we each would have given up on the journey of marriage long ago. We had examples, people like Don and Jane and others of you who have been married for years longer than we have. We had our parents’ praying for us and helping us. We’ve had Christian brothers and sisters to talk to when things got tough. What’s good in our marriage we owe to God and to the way He worked through His people. That’s how goodness is cultivated.
Only God is good. Yet by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ He wants to pour His goodness out into you and me. He forgives us and He makes us over into something new, something good. As we come to the table this morning, let us receive His goodness with thanksgiving. Let us look first to His example in giving Himself, and then continue to learn from all those who follow Him in His giving.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj