G Is for Good
In Holy Week, we return to the Divine Alphabet to marvel at and dig a bit into the goodness of God.
Normally, we’ll say something is good if it is measuring up to what it ought to be. For instance, we have an idea of what apples ought to be, and if you tell me you ate a good apple yesterday, I know that you mean it tasted good or was fresh and crisp, etc. We also use “good” in a moral sense, for instance, if we say someone is a good citizen. We mean things like: she is reliable, she pays her taxes, she looks out for her neighbors.
Here’s a true story. I was teaching an ethics class at a seminary, and began one day by saying I had bad scrambled eggs for breakfast. The obvious question you’d ask is: What made them bad? Were they rotten eggs? Were they runny? Or were they tough and inedible? All those are reasonable possibilities, different ways scrambled eggs can fall short of what we expect them to be. But what, I asked my students, would you say if I told you that my scrambled eggs were bad because they wouldn’t tie my shoes?
One student answered: “I’d say that’s why I love this class!”
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God, however, is not good because he lives up to standards. We don’t have an idea in advance of what a god is; we don’t look at our particular God and say, “He’s measuring up to standards. He’s a good God.” It’s also true in terms of morals. It never makes sense to describe God as someone who is morally well-behaved.
No, the goodness of God is radical.
God is good because he is the fountain of all goodness. Every good thing, whatever it is, comes from him, and he is the reason it’s good. The good apple, the good citizen, the good music, even (if you can imagine such a thing) the good blog post: their goodness comes from God.
We call God good because goodness, all goodness whatsoever, comes from him.
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Holy Week invites us to take these thoughts deeper. There is a day in Holy Week that is called a good day. It’s the Friday of course, the “Good” Friday. Why is it good?
It’s good because God accomplishes something good on that day. He takes all the cruelty of the universe, all the sorrow and all the wickedness, and he absorbs it. In taking all this upon himself (on the cross), he inaugurates a cosmic process of turning it around. The down-payment on this great reversal is his resurrection. He turns his own death into life.
God takes the worst and makes it good. That is the deepest reason God is good.
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On the Web. A recent short piece by yours truly on the ethics of “aid in dying” was published inThe Living Church and is now on their website: https://livingchurch.org/2020/03/17/ethics-aid-in-dying/