Or if I love my job more than I love my kids, then I may have great success in teaching students, but my own children will be distant from me. I may be happy at work but miserable at home. There’s nothing wrong with loving my wife or loving my job, but if it’s in the wrong order, then my life will be disordered. That’s not a good life! It’s only when I have the foundation of loving God and loving my neighbor that my other loves can follow in a healthy order. It’s our only hope of a good life. Ordered love is the rest that Saint Augustine has in mind.
THE STORY OF GOODNESS IN THE BIBLE
In the beginning, God creates goodness in everything. Stars, good. Water, good. Trees, good. Sharks? Also good. Heck, maybe even mosquitoes (though I have my doubts). God invites people to enjoy his good creation in a cosmic act of hospitality: take and eat.
But the serpent causes Adam and Eve to doubt the goodness of God. Maybe obedience to God is a limitation rather than freedom. Maybe he’s keeping something good from them. So rather than obey the Creator, Adam and Eve trust a creature instead. Hebrew scholar Dru Johnson suggests, “In order to know, you must listen to trusted authorities and do what they say in order to see what they are showing you.”4 Rather than do what God told them in order to see what he was showing them, our first parents did what the serpent told them, and as a result, they saw their shame. We fall prey to the same trap. We listen to the deceptive voice of the serpent, and we see our shame. We all exchange the love of God for the love of creatures, with the same result.
But God does not reject Adam and Eve; rather, he makes them a promise. An offspring will rise to crush the head of that wicked serpent. God continues to be gracious and patient. The reason he chooses the descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is not their might or wisdom. They are the losers of the bunch! God chooses this group of people because he loves them and is keeping his promise (Deut. 7:7–8).
God’s gracious choice of Israel leads to a choice being given to the people of Israel. After leading the people out of Egypt into the promised land, a new type of garden, God lays out the stipulations. He saves, and this is what it means to be God’s saved people: to be like God and to represent him to the watching world. God calls Israel to be holy as he is holy (Lev. 11:45). Before they enter the promised land, the people of Israel gather on Mount Ebal in Moab. On the mountaintop they receive a promise from God. If they obey, things will go well. If they disobey, they will be cursed. Who will they listen to: the pagan gods currently worshiped in that land or the God of creation? In summary, Moses writes this:
For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.
See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them. (Deut. 30:11–20)
According to Moses, obeying God is possible. It’s not too hard or far off. Do you want good things? Then obey. Do you want to avoid curses? Then follow God. It’s a simple decision. Would you rather live, or die? If we’re in our right mind, it’s not complicated. I’ll take life, please!
But the story of Israel is a story of failure. They choose to worship foreign gods and neglect the strangers in their midst. They do not take care of the land but instead exploit it. They fail to be a holy nation. Their disobedience results in a failure to love God and neighbor and a neglect of their gifted land. Every aspect of existence that was good is now broken. The people of Israel choose death.
Like Israel, we know the right thing to do. It’s not too hard for us. Yet we choose death over and over and over. Why do we make choices that kill us, that lead us further from God and increase our isolation from others, and that bring us the crippling shame that accompanies sin? It doesn’t make sense.
Jesus enters our confusion and shows us a good life, a flourishing life. When Pontius Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd before his crucifixion, he uses the phrase “Behold the man!” (John 19:5). Like numerous other people in the Bible, Pilate has said more than he intended. He is delivering Jesus to his death, but he is also pointing to the quintessential man, the man we should all see and desire to become. Jesus is the model to which we are to conform. He is wise, and his wisdom leads to obedience. He bears the curses of Deuteronomy on our behalf. Jesus comes to suffer the consequences of our sin, and he gives us the blessing he deserved. Jesus consistently obeys the law that we broke, so that we can receive his obedience.
Jesus invites his followers to a full life. He doesn’t want us to meet the bare-minimum requirements for heavenly entry. He wants us to walk in such a way that we will sense the kingdom of God. He desires that his followers live full, flourishing, happy lives, even now. Christianity is not merely a truth claim. It’s a way of life. The truth claims of the gospel have horizontal dimensions. If God loves us, then we are to love one another (1 John 4:7–11, 19). As W. H. Auden poetically puts it, “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.”5 Our love does not depend on whether we or others have our lives in order.
RESTORING THE “GOOD” IN THE GOOD LIFE
In the Gospel of Luke a lawyer comes up to Jesus, wrestling with an issue that’s similar to the one Deuteronomy presents: choosing a way that leads to life rather than death. He wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life. In Christian culture this phrase “eternal life” is often quickly filtered to mean life after death. It is a quantity of time that is forever. And that’s true enough. But it also has connotations of the quality of life. Eternal life is a kind of life worth living. This young lawyer wants to know how to live forever, sure, but he also wants a flourishing life—full, lasting life, life that leads not toward death and destruction but toward life everlasting.
Jesus, being the good teacher that he is, flips the question around. He asks what the young lawyer thinks. And the lawyer gives the right theological answer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27).
Bingo. Jesus says that the young lawyer is right. If you want a full life, if you want lasting joy beyond temporal happiness, if you want to make choices that lead to goodness and beauty, love God and neighbor. Order your loves. Choose life. It’s not too hard. It’s not too far off. The word is near. It’s simple. Go and love.
But the lawyer has a clarifying question: “And who is my neighbor?” What a brilliant question! If I can define “neighbor” however I want, the task becomes easier. I can be kind to people who vote like me. I can show mercy to those in my economic class. I can offer hospitality to those who can repay the favor. I can love those who share my interests. I can be nice to those who are nice to me.
In response, Jesus tells a story that makes “neighbor” a concrete reality instead of an abstract concept (Luke 10:30–37). Who is my neighbor in practice? In the story a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho is beaten up on the side of the road and left for dead.
Two religious figures, a priest and a Levite, pass by and don’t offer help. But then comes a Samaritan—one of those outcast half-breeds whom the Israelites hate. He goes to the man who was beat up, binds his wounds, pours oil and wine on him, puts him on a donkey, and takes him to an inn. The Samaritan tells the innkeeper that he will come back and cover the cost of whatever they spend.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously preached on this passage. He told of the mountainous and dangerous terrain of this road to Jericho, where thieves and robbers often hid out in search of an unsuspecting traveler. In closing, he offered these words:
And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked—the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”6
This latter question animates this text: If I don’t stop, what will happen to this person in front of me? If I don’t offer kindness? If I don’t use my voice and power to speak up and do something? If I don’t love them? How do I bring life to those around me?
Jesus ends the parable with a final question: “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36). The lawyer can’t even muster the words to say “the Samaritan,” his hatred of neighbor is so strong. All he can respond is, “The one who showed him mercy” (Luke 10:37).
So, back to the question of choosing life: Which way is eternal life? Jesus flips the idea of a flourishing life upside down. The first question regarding a life well lived is not what makes someone happy or what’s in it for them. Rather, the first question is how you may bring happiness to those around you. Virtue is about turning to others in love. Here is eternal life: loving God in such a way that it pours out into love of the vulnerable and needy, caring for the poor and suffering, offering gracious hospitality to those who may never repay. This is eternal life.
Elsewhere, Jesus says that loving God is like loving oneself.7 Indeed, once we see our neighbor as made in the image of God, the connection to loving God becomes clear and convicting. How we treat our neighbors is an indication of what we think of God. Or as Dorothy Day urges, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”8 Ouch. To turn away from loving our neighbor is to turn away from God.
The challenge in the good life is pursuing righteousness without self-righteousness. The good (and difficult) news is that grace ruins self-righteousness. Grace levels the playing field. Grace means that we are all equally flawed and eternally distant from the Father. Grace generates true humility, which does not seek praise or credit from others but ascribes righteousness where it is due. Paul asks a great rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 4:7: “What do you have that you did not receive?” The answer, of course, is “Nothing.” We receive everything we have and are. Our grace-driven effort does not earn God’s favor. It doesn’t make us better than others. It’s not about comparison at all. This side of heaven, we will never attain perfection, but we “press on to make it [our] own, because Christ Jesus has made [us] his own” (Phil. 3:12). Or as Paul says earlier in Philippians, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:12–13). We work, knowing that God is already at work. God is the one who does all things, so he gets the credit and glory for whatever progress we make.
As we pursue righteousness, there will always be a struggle to be authentically good rather than superficially good, to be and not to seem. I grew up playing soccer. Sometimes you can look at a person and tell whether they are good. They carry a confidence and have a swagger that tells others they are who they seem to be. Other times, looks can be deceiving. There are some people who look like Cristiano Ronaldo but are outed as posers when the ball comes near them. They may have the look and the gear, but they lack the substance. They’ve spent money to curate an image but avoided the hard work that develops excellence. The same can be true of our spiritual lives. The pursuit of goodness is about being truly good rather than pretending or playing a part.
THE GOODNESS OF THE LORD’S SUPPER
When we take the Lord’s Supper, God invites us into the good life of communion. We take goodness within our mouths, chew it, and digest it, and it becomes part of us. In our understanding of goodness we see that knowledge is more than intellectual. There’s a habitual or ritual shape to knowledge. To draw again on N. T. Wright, the way virtue is formed is through habitual action. The Lord’s Supper comes to feed us habitually. The ritual of remembrance shapes us to be a certain kind of people; we remember a sacrificial love so that we might become sacrificial people. As Christ is broken and given, so we break and give of ourselves for others. We are changed through this action as well as by our remembering. The Lord’s Supper forms us in virtue by our ritual participation.
In many ways the Lord’s Supper is a reversal of the fall. Our first parents followed the wisdom of the serpent and saw its consequence. When the serpent said to take and eat the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, they took and ate. And they saw their shame. Jesus offers another option. He offers us his very flesh and his very blood. The wisdom of Christ is the way that leads to life. Do this, and you will live. Take and eat.
CONCLUSION
I began this chapter with a few examples of my friends who were less theologically learned yet more virtuous than I was. They exemplified kindness and joy and patience while I felt that I was floundering, trying to find some footholds for my beliefs. I lived from my head and needed to enact my embodiment. My beliefs and my commitments needed to take shape, to be incarnated. As much as Christianity is a belief system, it is also a way of life. After all, Christ saves not by his words but by his life and his actions. I needed help putting my beliefs and words into practice.
The good news is that Christianity has a rich history of practices and habits that form Christians. They don’t earn our salvation, but they do provide a way of life that we don’t have to make up. The goal of growing in virtue is for us to become the type of people who are Christlike even without having to think about it. Responding with grace and love can become second nature when the story of Christianity is so much a part of us. The aim is that we develop Christlike character. My friends taught me by their lives more than by their lips. My friends gave me a vision of a life well lived. In growing up into Christ, I needed to see in order to know.
Having a worthy goal is the first step of character formation. Now we need to know which habits get us there.
1. Wright, After You Believe, 7.
2. Wright, After You Believe, 170.
3. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 21.
4. Johnson, Scripture’s Knowing, 16.
