NILS VON KALM argues that our division of people into “good” and “bad” is not the way Jesus sees us…
Melbourne, Australia
How do you see God? Genesis 1 tells us that God made us in God’s image, but we also make God in our image. And because of our human tendency to want revenge, much of our faith relies on belief in punishment, so we see God that way too. We believe in good and bad, and we simplify our faith by believing that there are good people and there are bad people.
Of course, we are always the good people, and the bad people are those who don’t sin in the way we do. The problem with that attitude is it’s the opposite of the way of Jesus. It’s the way the Pharisees saw the world. There were the righteous and there were the ‘sinners’, and holiness was about following the letter of the Law. Sinners, of course, didn’t do that, and they were therefore cursed by God. Bad things happened to them.
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This is why, of course, the Pharisees had such a hard time with Jesus hanging out with ‘sinners’. How could this guy go around saying He was from God and yet hang out with tax collectors, prostitutes and other people who were unclean according to the Law of Moses? It was clear as day that He couldn’t be from God. Worse still, He was a blasphemer, and there was only one remedy for that: He had to be eliminated.
The fact is that many Christians these days still have the attitude of the Pharisees and not the attitude of Jesus. If Jesus were here in person today, He would be hanging out with outlaw bikers, with corrupt billionaires, with young trans people, all the people whose morals are not just questionable, but despicable, according to respectable religious people. And they would be Jesus’ preferred people. We would find a way to eliminate Him all over again because we are more concerned about our attitude of moralism and personal holiness than we are about who the Son of God really is.
“In the world of many of us, there are good people and there are bad people. The problem is that Jesus didn’t see it this way. And if Jesus is God, we have a problem, because we are then not seeing things the way God sees them.”
In the world of many of us, there are good people and there are bad people. The problem is that Jesus didn’t see it this way. And if Jesus is God, we have a problem, because we are then not seeing things the way God sees them.
God is not about punishment. Never has been and never will be. God’s holiness, God’s justice, is always restorative. When our kids muck up, we might punish them, but we always do it because we want them to learn a lesson and grow into more mature people. It’s about restoring them. To paraphrase the words of Jesus, if we are like that, how much more is God like that? If we love our children and want them to grow, how much more does God love God’s children? And as the first letter of John reminds us, anyone who does what is right is a child of God.
Martin Luther King, Jr, said that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. Do we really believe that? Do we really believe that there is some evil in us? Even more, do we really believe there was some good in the people who have committed the worst atrocities in history? This is, of course, a very sensitive topic to talk about, and it’s because we tend to think in black and white, good and bad.
If we don’t believe there is good in the worst of us and evil in the best of us, we are not seeing people the way God sees them. Jesus saw the good in people. No-one – absolutely no-one – is beyond redemption.
This is where pop culture can actually teach us so much. The scene in the famous Star Wars movie, The Return of the Jedi, where Darth Vader, the evil dark lord, is changed because he finally finds the good in himself, is such a beautiful scene. It’s redemptive. In that story, Darth Vader, the personification of evil itself, is changed, and in the end we see him smiling as he stands alongside Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
People are not simply good or bad. Every single one of us is made in the image of God and we do both good things and we do bad things. We are a bundle of contradictions. And we are like this every day. It is the sin in us that needs to be dealt with and defeated, not us ourselves. This is exactly what Paul meant in Romans 7 when he says that when he does what he doesn’t want to do, it is not him who does it but sin in him (Romans 7:16-25).
Jesus came to defeat sin; He didn’t come to defeat sinners. People who do evil are not the enemy. Sin is the enemy. When we see everyone as made in the image of the God of love, as Jesus does, we will then truly love people and not shame them or judge them.
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When we see sin, and not sinners, as the enemy, we will more clearly see love as the weapon that defeats sin. This is why the command to love our enemies is so profound and important. It is love of our enemies that is the only force that has the power to defeat sin. Love is the only force that has the power to turn an enemy into a friend, to turn a Darth Vader back into a person of the light. Abraham Lincoln famously made this point when asked how he would defeat his enemies. He said, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”.
The problem is that we have the attitude of punishment so ingrained into us that we think such an attitude that Lincoln displayed is weak and lets the evildoer get away with their evil. But to think like this is to still be in the mindset of punishment. It’s why so many of us believe in the eternal conscious torment of people who reject God. We want them to pay. We want revenge, and we call it justice but it’s not justice at all. The justice of God is about restoration and renewal.
It’s way past time that we preached the true justice of God from our pulpits, the justice that desires that all people be saved, just like God does (I Timothy 2:4, II Peter 3:9).
The attitude of people being simply good or bad is not Christian. So we need to reject it. In our desire for certainty and simplicity, we deny the truth of life and the truth of God and the very Gospel we say we believe in. Every single one of us has both good in us and evil in us.
It’s a humbling realisation that, at my worst, I am capable of the atrocities of a Hitler, and that, at my best, I am capable of the beauty of a Mother Teresa. This is why we must daily seek God out and plea for God’s Spirit to fill us so that we live the life of Jesus and therefore become a part of the transformation of the world, with the Spirit of God working in us and out through us to help bring God’s reign on Earth as it is in Heaven.
