Why Be Good?

 

Why Be Good?

June 9, 2021

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. 

 

Why should we be good? Why should we behave ourselves? Why should we do good and not ill? How to behave and our motivation for behaving in some particular way are fundamental questions for all human beings. We are all faced all the time with the choice between being good and being bad. Most of have been raised being told not to be bad, but why not? Billy Joel sings, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun. Only the good die young.” Let’s admit it. There are all kinds of bad behavior that are either fun, or are financially beneficial, or both. So why not be bad? The author of the biblical book Ecclesiastes, said to be Solomon but actually unknown, knew that being good doesn’t necessarily get you anything in this life. He wrote: “There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous.” Ecclesiastes 8:14. I often say that the author of Ecclesiastes needed antidepressant meds, but he’s right about this one. Being good doesn’t guarantee that you’ll do well in life, and being bad doesn’t guarantee that you won’t. So why to go all the trouble of being good and giving up all you have to give up to do it?

Christianity has of course long had a pat answer to that question: Be good so your soul will go to heaven when you die. Don’t be bad so you won’t spend eternity in the fiery torment of hell after you die. I once saw this answer depicted in a bumper sticker. It had a border of flame. The text said, “Where will you spend eternity?” The implied default answer was hell. Do right, or that’s where you will spend eternity. I’m lucky. I was never fed that line as the reason why I must be good not bad. I have however spoken with many people who were fed that line. For many of them that line nearly destroyed their faith or actually destroyed it altogether. Sometimes I have been able to help them find a healthier understanding of God. Sometimes not.

Now, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I must assume that at least some of you were taught that kind of Christianity as you grew up. I don’t know whether some of you are reading this post because you’re looking for a better way, but I can at least hope that you are. So now I want to ask: What’s wrong with that traditional Christian answer to the question of why we should be good not bad? It does, after all, give a powerful incentive to be good, good at least as that kind of Christianity defines good. I want to start to answer that question by looking at just who we Christians confess God to be.

We confess that God is love. 1 John 4:16. We confess that we see in Jesus Christ what it means for God to be love. Yes, in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus often has bad people cast into the furnace of fire, or into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. See for example Matthew 13:42. Nowhere else in the Gospels does Jesus say any such thing. The author of Matthew was into weeping and gnashing of teeth. Jesus wasn’t. Jesus was about bringing God’s love to those who need it most, to the least and the lost. Jesus was about forgiving sinners and welcoming them into the kingdom of God ahead of the supposedly righteous ones. Jesus was about revealing God’s ways as the exact opposite of most if not all of the ways of the world. “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world.”  John 3:17a. In Christ Jesus God reconciled the whole world and everyone in it to Godself. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19. In Jesus Christ we know that absolutely nothing can or ever will separate us from the love of God. Romans 8:38-39. So no. The God we know in Jesus never has and never will send anyone to any place of eternal fiery torment. Pope Paul VI said the thought there was such a place as hell, but he wasn’t sure anyone was in it. I’ll go one step farther. I don’t believe that hell exists. I don’t believe that the God who is infinite, self-giving love, love so vast that we can’t really comprehend it, would ever create a place like hell.

What sort of God would create a place like hell? A God who is a vicious monster, that’s what kind of God would do it. A God of hate not love. A God of wrath not reconciliation. A God more concerned with God’s own ego and with an earthly kind of justice writ large rather than with heavenly love writ large. That’s who the God as know as agape, as love more concerned for the other than for the self, simply hasn’t done and never will do. The God we know as love never has and is not going to condemn anyone to any place anything like the traditional Christian images of hell. These things are what’s wrong with that traditional Christian answer to the question of why we should be good considered from God’s side of the God-human relationship.

Now consider that answer from the human side of that relationship. What kind of faith is faith clung to in order to avoid hell? It is faith grounded in fear not love. That traditional Christian answer to our question doesn’t make people love God. It makes people fear God. Indeed be terrified of God. Terrified of what God supposedly will do to us, to any- and everyone of us actually, if we do bad things, even if we just make a mistake and commit some sin inadvertently. Terrified of what God will do to us if we aren’t morally perfect, and who other than Jesus has ever been morally perfect? No one, that’s who.

Faith confessed in a desperate attempt to avoid hell really isn’t faith at all. More than belief, faith is trust. Trust in God. Trust in God’s love. Fear is the opposite of trust. Because God is love not hate, God wants us to trust God and trust God’s love not fear God and God’s vengeance. In the Bible the first thing those heavenly messengers we call angels always say when they meet some human being is, “Fear not.” “Do not be afraid.” God doesn’t come to us in angels or in any other way to terrify us into behaving ourselves. God certainly didn’t come to us in Jesus of Nazareth to do that. That’s just not who God is, all the Christian insistence to the contrary notwithstanding.

So if being good doesn’t guarantee blessings in this life (Deuteronomy to the contrary notwithstanding, see for example Deuteronomy chapter 28), and if we don’t have to fear God sending us to eternal torment in hell, why should we be good? If God’s never going to damn us no matter what we do or don’t do, isn’t anything permissible? Doesn’t anything go? Aren’t we left with no incentive at all to do good not bad? I’ve heard that objection to the theology I’m advocating here often enough over the years. People have told me any number of times that my theology takes away all incentive or motivation for us to be good. Don’t I have to admit that that objection is correct?

Well no, it isn’t correct, and I don’t have to admit to it. It can seem to be correct to someone who hasn’t gotten over faith as fear. Those of us who have gotten over faith as fear, or who like me never had that faith to begin with, know that there is a better way. We know that God is love not hate. We know that God holds each and every one of us and indeed all of creation in love so vast and so unconditional that any human love we have known, as wonderful as it may have been, is but a pale reflection of that divine love. We know that God’s love will never fail us. We know that we can trust that love in everything that happens in our lives and even when our lives end in death. We know that any notion inconsistent with God as love simply cannot be true. God is love. Infinite, unconditional love. Of that we are certain. On that truth we will stake our very lives.

So when we know that God does and always will hold us in divine love, how are we to respond? In fear? No! With hatred of anyone? No! To stand in awe before God is appropriate. To stand in fear before God never is. We respond with lives of love. It’s not so much that we’re supposed to respond to love with love, though we are. It’s that we cannot not respond to God’s love with lives of love. Paul asked how people who have died to sin can go on sinning. Romans 6:2. I hear him saying that once you truly know and have opened your heart and mind to God’s love sin simply is no longer an option. You don’t sin, that is, you don’t misbehave and harm any person or any part of God’s creation, because you know the truth of life, that life is about love not hate, helping not harming, lifting up not tearing down.

So why should we be good? Because we know that God’s creation is good. Genesis 1:1-2:3. We know that God created it in love. We know that God loves us more than we will ever truly comprehend. We know that the love that God pours out on us must evoke from us a response of love. “For God so loved the world.” John 3:16a. How then can we not love God in return? And if we truly love God, how can we harm any of God’s beloved creatures? We can’t. We just can’t. That’s why we should be good. Not to save our souls from hell but because God is so good to us. So let’s overcome life based in fear of eternal damnation with life based in trust in God’s unfailing love. If we will do that we will please God. We will live lives we know are worth living. May it be so. Thanks be to God.