The Good News is that We are not Good

Very early in the history of the Christian movement something both strange and necessary happens. A complex historical event, the crucifixion of a man named Jesus, becomes a simple theological event: the death God at the hands of humanity. The historicity remains. The individual characters and groups are all remembered and their actions reenacted weekly and yearly. Nobody loses his or her name. 

What they all lose, all except for Jesus, is their claim to possess righteousness. Jesus, hanging on the cross, becomes the only righteous human. So even as he dies all the righteousness goes out of the human world. 

Of course that isn’t the end of the story, but before we get to the end of the story we need to acknowledge that none of us possesses on our own any righteousness, any goodness, whatsoever. Because this is the only way that we can avoid poisoning ourselves, our families, and our societies with self-righteousness. 

And self-righteousness is a poison, one that destroys the souls of its possessors while creating ever increasing conflict among them and with others. We need look only into the bitter politics of our present society to see this poison at play. Instead of asking what best serves the common good politicians play to the gallery of their self-righteous supporters shouting “crucify him!” 

What Christianity teaches is that only Christ possesses righteousness, and humans only partake of, but never possess, this righteousness. When we manage to somehow do good it is never us, but Christ at work in us.

A practical implication of this is that we have no right or basis to judge whether others are righteous. That is knowledge forever hidden from human eyes. We may (and must) set up human standards of conduct and judge whether individuals conform to them, but whether their conformity or rebellion is righteous is far beyond us to judge given that we possess no righteousness of our own with which to compare their behavior. 

Quite apart from the self-regard that blinds all of us as humans to our true nature, a self-regard our hastily said prayers of confession do little to dampen, we Methodists face a particular kind of self-delusion around righteousness. Despite our theological training we perpetually confuse our Armenian understanding of human freedom with the Pelagian heresies of self-righteousness. We think that because we are free then we are also free to do good, to possess our own righteousness, to actually choose the good and thus stand in judgment of those who haven’t. 

But of course we aren’t. Our only freedom, real nonetheless, is to choose to receive as a gift what we never really possess: the righteousness of Christ. Or we have the freedom to choose which of the manifold paths to eternal damnation are always open to us. 

A second problem is our supposed doctrine of sanctification and even “entire sanctification.” Methodists too commonly believe that this means they are somehow personally, and even collectively becoming more holy, more like God, more righteous. This is dangerous nonsense. Sanctification isn’t a process of becoming personally holy. It is a process of slowly losing one’s self into the holiness of God by following Christ. We don’t become more holy, we become less our natural selves and more vessels for the work of the Spirit.   

To a modern person this disempowering discourse may not sound like Good News, but it is. The great anxiety of our time arises because we believe we are entirely on our own in a finite universe. As a result all our decisions are fraught with eternal, existential implications. We believe that whether we exist or cease to exist (as individuals, as families, as churches, as societies, and as humanity) is entirely in our own hands. 

With so much on the line we cannot tolerate anyone who gets out of line, including ourselves. Self-righteousness becomes our only, and truly desperate, defense against the great void of perpetual fear and pain. Yet as Paul so clearly understood, self-righteousness inevitably collapses into demands for purity that alienate us from one another and gnaw away at any hope for the future. We’re all we have, and we’re not enough. 

The Good News is that God on the cross has done everything that needs to be done for us to be saved, to have a future, to live full and meaningful lives. It makes the story more interesting, and aids our self-understanding that we can see individual characters play out their distinctive roles. Peter, the disciples, Pilate, the Roman soldiers, the religious authorities, the crowds; each offer a path to better self-understanding. But all the paths lead to the same conclusion: we possess no righteousness of our own.

So thank God that God whom we crucified cannot be held in the graves we dig or the hells we imagine. Instead God rises on the third day. In rising God destroys our self-righteousness and its hellish fruits to make room for God’s Spirit and the righteousness of Christ within us. Which, so long as we never claim it as our own, never use it to judge others, and never presume to offer it as our own to others, will lead us inevitably to God.