Looking for the Goodness is a Game I don’t Play
“Look for the moments of ‘moral beauty’: when you are losing faith in people, Dr. Jamil Zaki (Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness) said to take 15 minutes out of your day and look for moments of kindness – what Dacher Keltner, the author of Awe, calls ‘moral beauty.’ I tried it, and those moments added up quickly: A guy in a truck stopped at a light, joking with a stranger in the car next to him; a woman at the supermarket let someone go ahead of her because he had only two items. Afterward, I was persuaded that people are inherently good.” (“Don’t Fall Into The Cynicism Trap,” Jancee Dunn, New York Times, 10/6/24).
“God makes righteousness, which is the job of the gospel; he [sic] does not discover righteousness that is already there (as the law does). God’s revelation shower is not the arrival of an inspector or the judgment of the law over what humans have produced. It is new, and it is God’s own making.” (Luther’s Outlaw God, Volume 1: Predestination, Election and Gospel, Stephen Paulson, 2019)
Watching and waiting for the arrival of God (the work of Advent, but alas, it is a year-round enterprise) is not a waiting for the Grand Inspector who will approve of our life’s handling, however feeble or noble. Rather it is a listening if not also a visual scanning for the Grand Liberator who will take away and destroy the “moral vs. immoral” battle that reigns and is never ending and replaces it with a newly created goodness that is beyond measure, beyond and outside of measurement.
I am not hopeful because I have done the math and measure the number of good, or even redemptive, events or human behaviors in my day or life. Rather, I have heard that the math never adds up and that game is over. Paul, in Romans (10:4), names it as “Christ is the end of the law.”
Want to make a better use of your 15 minutes? Read the Bible for that amount of time each day and ask this: “what is God demanding here?” and “what is God promising here?” Then find a friend who is willing to talk with you once a week about what you have been reading and place all that reading and conversation up against the very real evil you see in our world and the very real good that you see in our world. Then, don’t do the math to see if Good is winning or Evil is winning but realize that that math never adds up to anything about what will become of us with God but only works to help us see and act on reducing the body count and care of creation carnage in our fragile world. Then, and here’s the last thing, see that your hope with God (and your sense of finding something to feel good about that will stop your cynicism) rests entirely with God and not the math of our behaviors and beliefs.
