Where'd all the good people go?

 I started the sermon on Sunday talking about the big question, and then the smaller question behind the big question.

The big question is the one that asks 'Why do bad things happen to good people?' That question is used so frequently that it's become a bit trite. The question, ever hanging at the border of any theological question, is the one that asks 'if God is so good, then why do  bad things happen to such good people?' Why indeed?

But there's a smaller question that is at the fringes of that question, that I would like to pose to you now: If there are so many good people around, then why do bad things happen? If we are living in a world of bad things happening constantly, famine, war, pestilence, mayhem, cruelty, injustice, there where did all the good people go? Essentially, the prevalence of 'good people' comes down to a matter of self reporting, and that's a problem overall. That is, self-reporting is almost always a major problem to contend with because of how inaccurate it is, and nowhere is that more prominent than in the assessment of who the good people and bad people are.  Because we all know who the bad people are, right?

Okay yes, those are bad guys. But they're cartoonishly bad guys. These are people (with the exception of Mussolini) who unabashedly do bad things just to be bad. And that's not the real world, not really. Most human beings who live on planet earth don't do bad things just to be bad. That's an offshoot of good impulses and motives, taken too far, or in the wrong way. I think this video explains things pretty well vis-a-vis the Emperor.

Unlike human beings with real motivation, he's evil and he loves it. But that's in fantasyland, and not the real world. Sadly, though, we sort of expect things to work like that, expecting that you'd find real human beings whose motivations it would be to be just pure evil. They'd be bad for the sake of being bad, and would have no motivation beyond that. 

But that's not how humanity works, you know. Nobody does bad things just for the sake of them being bad, or wicked on purpose. Those consequences are made of cruelty and wickedness, but they are consequences. We truly have to get ourselves out of the mindset that self reported is sufficient for arriving at a good people vs bad people equation.

And that's what makes the parable of the Good Samaritan so interesting. That is, at the start of the parable, the man on a journey gets beaten and robbed by robbers. That's always kind of assumed, but I want you to consider very carefully the nature of a robbing like that - namely that the robbers have to rob someone. In the story, the Priest, the Levite, the Samaritan always take centre stage, and nobody really considers the robbers as participants in the story. They're like a force of nature, like zombies or something, you know? And as that kind of thing, even though we question the motivations of the priest and the levite, somehow, we never really consider the motivations of the robbers. But we should.

The thing is, the robbers are not like an earthquake, or a fire, or a tsunami, they're people, but more than that, they're people who assume that they're good people. They would, in fact, self identify as being good people, nice to people who like them, generous to their friends, gave their mother flowers, that kind of thing. But in the story, we think of them not even as bad people, but as bad elements. That is, they are the bad thing in the story that kicks off the plot. No agency, no nothing, just bad things that happen to a good person. And that's what I really want you to think about. 

When we say 'why do bad things happen to good people?' a lot (though not all) of the 'bad things' that happen to 'good people' are actually wrought by human beings, who almost universally consider themselves to be the heroes of their own stories, and view themselves as good people. So the secondary question that came about at the start of this blog post can be answered:

If there are so many good people, why do bad things still happen? Because the bad things are perpetrated by good people.

There. And that's the moral conundrum explained, and it requires Christian morality to improve. I'll put it like this - In the Christian conception of morality, there's a lot of discussion about how we are all bad news. In sin were we conceived, none is righteous, no not one, that kind of thing. And the breakdown between what we want and what we are has its locus in the reality that all the people, including those who do bad things, think of themselves as being good people. And that's the end of it. Once you work that out, then everything falls into place quite happily. Everything makes sense completely. Bad things happen to people because people do things to other people, and continue to think of themselves as being good.

So what do we do about it? Well, quite simply, we deal with the Biblical truths of the matter: Bad things happen to people because people do bad things to one another, and we are part of that exchange, through and through. We have sinned in thought, word and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. You'd think that that would lead to us thinking of ourselves as being bad people, and being despoiled by the world, etc, but that's simply not the case. Rather, it gets to the heart of the human condition, which is that we want to think that we are good people. We want to believe that we do good things, and are noble and truthful. Justified, in a word. So we have two choices when faced with the misery around us:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us

But if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just, will forgive us our sins, and will cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

One of those paths leads to you ignoring the problem in you, but seeing it in everyone else, driving you to misery and despair. The other lets you look in the mirror, and be justified not because you've done good, but because you've been forgiven. And that's the way the world actually is.