The Death of a Good Man

“Why do you call me good? No one is good, except God”—Jesus

When I was a kid….heck…even when I had grown up…I knew what I wanted to be.  I wanted to be good.  I wanted to be a good kid…a good man…a good person.  I wanted to be that person that when they spoke about me, they would say, “Bob was a good man…”  For the longest time, to be recognized as good was the only thing I wanted.  I have realized that this is a dream that will never be realized.

What does it mean to be good? There are so many ways to answer this question.  We can be good at our jobs, as in having competent skills.  We can be good, meaning we have an inner morality that helps us excel at things.

When I was a child, I would think about my heroes and want to be like them.  I was a child of the 80s, so we had Luke Skywalker and Michael Knight as some of our heroes, but there were also a number of good people that I knew.  My scout master was a good man and teacher was a good guy.  There was something that set them apart from other people that they just exuded ‘goodness.’ There wasn’t anything in particular you could quantify, it just was.  And I knew that I wanted to be good like them.

The problem is…it never worked out the way that I wanted it to.  Maybe I didn’t try hard enough…maybe I didn’t want it enough…or maybe….I’m just not good.

It has seemed that life has put me in roles where I am forced to choose.  The question is not whether or not I will hurt somebody…the question always seems to come down to who I will.  I never feel like I can adequately please all the people all the time and when the great choices have to be made, I always feel like I am on the wrong side of them.

When I was a kid, I read Les Miserables.  It took me a long time to get through it.  I remember being puzzled over Jean Valjean’s quest to be good and the trouble it got him in.  He tried to take care of his nephew and wound up in jail.  Then he tried to take care of Fantine and it cost him his life, essentially.  He spends his entire life trying to do the right thing only to be stopped time and again by being forced to choose between impossible situations. Although he is clearly redeemed in the book, I found myself struggling along with him.

One of the reasons I think I am attracted to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was because he struggled exactly with this issue.  Was Bonhoeffer a martyr? Perhaps not in the clearest sense of the word, but he was a man who struggled to be good.  Clearly in prison he struggled with the question, “Who am I?”  In his poem, Bonhoeffer struggles with what other people say he is and the struggle he knew that was going on underneath.  He did not want to be labeled as a good man because he knew himself to be otherwise. 

Bonhoeffer also struggled with the decisions he knew he had to make.  Should he participate in the plot to kill Hitler? Does this make him a murderer?  Does it contradict the values and the ethics that he had clearly taught?  Bonhoeffer was a strict adherent to nonviolence and pacifism.  But he is willing to compromise this to end the war by killing a man.  It might be the right thing to do, he argues, but it does not make him a good man.

            However, I do not struggle with anything so powerful as this.  Nor do I think of my life in terms of such grand schemes.  I am simply a man, struggling to understand what it means to serve my God and my family and my country at the same time.  Maybe somewhere there might be clarity but it always seems that no matter what, I am disappointing someone…or something. 

            I find it interesting that Jesus poses this question.  The man who asks it was simply trying to address Jesus in a polite way.  “Good teacher…”  Jesus immediately responds pounces on this and points out something that we might not even have thought about.

            “Why do you call me good? Only God is good.”  Now theological positions aside (I believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man), this is an interesting statement. 

            First... Jesus asks, ‘why do you…’ while not wanting to get into the weeds…is Jesus asking this because he knows the man has a grasp of what it means to be good? Or is He pointing out that the man is not good and it is hypocritical for the lawyer to call Jesus ‘good.’  I tend to think that Jesus is pointing out the man’s ungoodness and suggesting that this words may not mean much coming from him. 

            Perhaps we should evaluate this in our lives.  Who call us good? Who do we allow to confer the title of ‘good’ on us?  Who do we give the moral authority to say whether we are good or not?  If the answer is a bunch of people that are not good…well then maybe we ought to think about that.  Maybe, their definition of ‘good’ is flawed and perhaps they don’t see all of us.

            Second, Jesus reminds the man that only God is good.  What a powerful statement to say.  We have here a very dismal view of human achievement and we can almost see psychologists and psychiatrists having a field day with Jesus here.  We are, after all, the society that keeps asking, ‘why do bad things happen to good people.’  But here Jesus explicitly says that only God is ‘good’.  To put it in very distinctive talk, there is only person that knows what good is, and that is God.  Our definition of GOOD then has to reflect this, that only God, then, has the right to call us good. 

            When Bonhoeffer ended his poem and his struggle, he ended up exactly where I am.  He wrote:

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

God has answered the question and He does not call us good.  He call us, His. 

            So I can stop trying to be good…I was never really good at it anyway.  In fact, I know that I will never be the type of man that I wanted to be when I was younger.  I know that I am deeply flawed, horribly contradictory and all together, ungood.  But what matters is that God knows me and claims me.  I, like Bonhoeffer cast up our lives to God and trust that He knows what we are…good or not.