On Good, Evil, and Human Nature

 

On Good, Evil, and Human Nature

December 8, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

There’s something about the Psalms in particular that bothers me. We see an example of it at Psalm 33:1: “Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright.” Do you see the assumption about people behind that verse? People are either righteous and upright or they aren’t. You’re either one or the other, righteous or unrighteous, good or bad. We see scripture dividing people into the good and the bad often. Christ does it in the great last judgment scene at Matthew 25:31-46. Either you cared for “the least of these” or you didn’t. I always want to ask: What about those of us who sometimes are righteous and sometimes aren’t? What about those of us who sometimes care for the least of these and sometimes don’t? After all, isn’t that every one of us? My quarrel with so many biblical texts that sharply divide people into the good and the bad is that that’s just not how it is with us humans. There’s no nuance in these texts. Yes, texts like Matthew 25:31-46 can be great teaching tools, but they just don’t reflect what it is to be human. Aren’t we all a bit of both? Aren’t we all some good and some bad all bound together in one complex package of imperfect humanity made in the image and likeness of God? I know that’s how it is with me. I know that that’s how it is with you too. I may not know you, but I know that you’re human. I don’t know the particulars about you and your life, but that you are human is all I need to know to know that you too are a complex mixture of the good and the bad. We all are. As St. Paul said, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23.

Yet all of us have done some good in our lives too We are nuanced creatures, made little lower than God (Psalm 8:5), but fallible, imperfect. I don’t much care for the hoary Christian notion of “the Fall,” but we cannot deny that none of us is perfect. Neither can we deny that each of us has a spark of the divine in us. That spark glows brighter in some people than in others, but it is implanted in each of us. Even Donald Trump, hardly a paragon of virtue, probably loves his children. Far too often scripture doesn’t seem to get it about how complex and nuanced we humans really are.

As I was writing these words, however, I thought, “Wait a minute. Wasn’t there one perfect human being? Wasn’t there one person in history who was all good and no evil?” That’s what I was taught, probably in Sunday School, about Jesus Christ. Yes, he was truly human, but he was also perfectly human. He is the perfect model of how God wants human life to be. I recently said something along those lines in something I was writing. My wife read what I had written. She said in effect no, if Jesus were perfect then he wouldn’t be truly human. She pointed to one Gospel passage in which Jesus sure seems to have messed up, to have gotten it wrong, to have done something we could hardly call good. It’s the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman at Matthew 15:21-28. It goes like this.

Jesus has gone from Galilee into the district of Tyre and Sidon. Tyre and Sidon were Phoenician port cities on the Mediterranean coast of what today is Lebanon. They’re still there, although I suppose that today they are Arab not Phoenician. The Phoenicians were Semites, but they weren’t Jews. A woman the text calls Canaanite comes to him. Sometimes you’ll see her called the Syrophoenician woman, but either way she isn’t Jewish. She shouts at Jesus, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Matthew 15:22. The unstated implication is that this mother wants Jesus to exorcized the demon out of her daughter. We’re told that at first Jesus “did not answer her at all.” Matthew 15:23a. Jesus’ disciples, who it seems have come to this place with him though we haven’t been told that they did, urge him to send the woman away because she keeps shouting at them. Then Jesus speaks, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Matthew 15:24. It’s unclear whether Jesus meant all the people of Israel or only those who were particularly lost, but either way he’s saying that he was sent to minister only to Jews. The woman in question here wasn’t a Jew, so at least by implication that’s why Jesus refuses to help her.

Clearly Jesus has made a mistake here, but then what he does gets worse. Once again the woman pleads for help. Jesus answers her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Matthew 15:26. Say what?! Jesus has just called this woman a dog! She was a human mother distraught over her daughter’s unwell condition. She interpreted the daughter’s problem as demonic possession. We’d probably say the daughter suffered from a mental illness, but either way Jesus scorns the woman and essentially calls her a bitch.

The woman won’t give up. She knows that Jesus can cure her daughter. We don’t know how she knows that, but she does. She’s not about to stop pleading for the help her daughter so obviously needs. She says to Jesus, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Matthew 15:27. Finally Jesus gets it. He says, “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” Matthew 15:28. The story ends with the woman’s daughter instantly healed, presumably through Jesus’ divine intervention.

There simply is no doubt that Jesus screwed up here. At least it certainly appears on the surface of the story that he did. He called a distraught woman pleading for help for her child a dog. Even if it were true that Jesus came only to minister to the Jews, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t make this woman a dog. I like actual dogs as much as the next guy, but calling any person a dog is clearly an insult and a putdown. Even if ministering to this woman had somehow violated the terms of Jesus’ divine mission, which it wouldn’t have, he’d hardly be justified in calling her a dog. In this incident Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, Emmanuel (God With Us), our Lord and Savior got it wrong. At least if we take this story at face value he got it so wrong that it’s surprising that the story made it into the Bible at all. The best thing we can say about what Jesus did here is that he made a big mistake, came to realize his mistake, and then did what is right.

Does the fact that Jesus made a mistake here establish that he is not a model of perfect humanity? I don’t think so. First of all, this is one story out of a great many stories about Jesus in the Gospels. It is legitimate to ask, Why is it here? Perhaps it is here as a model for the proper way for us to handle our mistakes. Jesus doesn’t tell us how to do that, he shows us how to do that by making a mistake and then correcting it. Of course there could have been a story about Jesus told to make the same point without having Jesus call a woman distraught about her daughter’s dire illness a dog and refusing at first to help her as only he could, but this is the story we get. So let’s learn from it that our mistakes are not things for us to cling to and keep repeating. The proper response to our mistakes is to  realize them, then do what we can to repair any damage our mistakes have done to ourselves or others. That certainly is a lesson worth learning from this story.

Then consider this. Try thinking of this story not as proving that Jesus wasn’t perfect but as showing us what perfect humanity actually is. Even a perfect person is not God. Well yes, Jesus was God, but his acting so human here tells us that as the perfect human being Jesus made mistakes.  Perfect humanity screwed up. There’s a powerful lesson for us in that way of understanding this story. It tells us that to err is human, as the old saw has it. So don’t beat yourself up too badly when you make a mistake. Don’t expect to be perfect in the sense of never making a mistake. That goal is beyond us. Rather, be perfect in the way you handle your mistakes. Acknowledge them, do what you can to make up for them, confess them to God and pray for forgiveness (which God is always offering (actually has already given) even before you ask for it), then let go of the mistake. We never read in the Bible that Jesus let guilt over his mistake in this story eat at him or stop him from pursuing his divine mission. We learn that we mustn’t let our mistakes eat us up and keep us from living lives as much like Jesus’ life as we can.

So mistake and all, Jesus is our model of perfect humanity. We can make mistakes and still strive to live perfect human lives. Perfect humanity isn’t flawless humanity. It is humanity lived as flawlessly as we can. Jesus doesn’t model something that is beyond us. Rather he models for us not what divine life is but what God calls human life to be, mistakes and all. Perfect humanity is not divinity. It is perfect humanity, but it isn’t perfect in the sense of flawless and error free because it is human not divine. That is the perfect humanity Jesus models for us in this story.

So let’s not get hung up on the way so many Bible passages suggest that we humans are either all good or all bad. We aren’t either of those things. None of us is. We’re all a mixture of both. So be gentle with each other. Be gentle with yourself. Understand that no one is perfectly bad and accept that no one is perfectly good. That’s just how it is with us humans; and like God said at the very beginning, it is good. Thanks be to God!