Jesus' Kind of Good

Jesus' Kind of Good--February 22, 2018

"Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit..." [1 Peter 3:18]

My son has been pretending to be the superhero Black Panther a lot lately, and over all, it makes me smile a deep Dad kind of smile.  He hasn't seen the movie yet (he is six, after all, and as great as the movie is, there are certainly things in it that are not for six year olds), but he wears his Black Panther mask and claws, and his sister can play along, too, as the brilliant younger sister/inventor/princess/fellow hero Shuri, and, at least for a few minutes, everyone in my house can be playing the same thing at the same time, which is a rarity.  And like I say, it makes me smile to see him picturing himself as the king-and-super-suited-defender-of-his-people Black Panther (also known, when not wearing his cat-suit, as T'Challa, like Superman is Clark Kent or Iron Man is Tony Stark--spoiler alert!). 

It makes me smile, just for one because my own inner nerd can play along, too, in these superhero adventures.  And I am glad, too, because I have heard my son say, "My favorite hero is Black Panther--he looks like me."  And in all honesty, that means something powerful, since so many of the handful of other superheroes out there who do share my son's brown skin are either relegated to the role of sidekicks (I'm looking at you, War Machine, Falcon, or Batman's new addition, the Signal), or are wrongfully-accused escaped convicts-turned-profiteers (Luke Cage), or are vampires (Blade).  And, as I know many others have noted themselves in the last few weeks since the new Black Panther movie comes out, there is something good and honorable about a hero who isn't on the run form the law, looking for a paycheck, or stuck playing second fiddle, but who understands the role of being a protector for his people, and the importance of his character as a leader as much as the power in his muscles.  The stories we tell our children may in some sense be "just stories," but they also shape the direction of their imaginations, of what kind of world they will inhabit, and of who they dream of becoming, and so just on that count, I am glad to have a hero who doesn't need to carry a gun to be strong, and who can also be a good leader, even of a fictional country like Black Panther's Wakanda, for my son to aspire to, alongside the other heroes, mentors, and examples he takes up in his life.

But I'll also tell you a funny routine we go through at our house, any time we are playing as new superhero characters.  Every time my son learns about a new character, whether from a cartoon show, a commercial on TV, a friend at school, or in the pages of a comic book, he'll ask me two questions: first, "Is that a good guy?" and second, "Who are the bad guys he fights?"

He has learned the usual order of things in a comic-book world: there are "good guys" and there are "bad guys," and the basic verb connecting them is "fight."  That sums up the basic logic of any comic book/superhero movie, doesn't it?  The title tells you who the "good guy" or team of "good guys" will be, and then you'll have a climactic showdown between the hero and the "bad guy," where they fight.  That's just what they do, isn't it?  Cows give milk, ducks and chicks lay eggs, baseball players hit home runs, and good guys fight bad guys.  In my son's six-year-old mind, that's almost the way you know they are good guys--they are the ones fighting the people labeled "bad guys."

And I have to tell you, when we play superheroes at our house, even if I get stuck being a second- or third- tier villain while he gets to be Black Panther, there is something refreshingly simple about seeing the world that way.  I get it why that is so appealing--everything is so perfectly clear.  If you're not a good guy, you're a bad guy, and vice versa, and the way you know who you are is to look at who you're fighting.  In the real world things are messier, as the best of us still have selfish intentions a lot of the time, and the worst of us have streaks of beauty within us.  The times with simple good-guy-versus-bad-guy battles in our living room need no shade of gray like that, because there is just one repeating storyline: good guys fight bad guys.  End of story.

The way of Jesus, however, tells a different story.  An entirely different kind of story, to be truth.  Oh, there are still heroes and villains, "good" characters and "bad" characters, in the story we call Gospel.  But the verb connecting them is not "fight."  As the early Christian witness that we call First Peter puts it, the story of Jesus is the story of the Good One laying down his life for a whole world full of "the Bad Guys."

"Christ also suffered for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous," he writes.  The "righteous" one dies for the "unrighteous."  That's scandalous.  That totally blows up our usual expectation of how you know who the good guy is--conventional wisdom says that the hero is just "whoever-is-fighting-the villain."  Our usual way of seeing things is that justice has to attack whatever is unjust... that good has to destroy evildoers... that good guys reveal their "goodness" precisely by fighting the bad guys.  And then here, ol' Pete says that Jesus' way of being righteous is to lay down his life for the unrighteous--the justice of Jesus is in suffering for the unjust.  That redefines what it means to be a "good guy" for us Christians, then.

This is what makes the way of Jesus so scandalous--and probably far more radical than we give it credit for.  The earliest Christians saw it, and then we have been trying to remold and remake Jesus to fit into the mold of superhero rather than the cruciform savior he insists on being.  It's rather like Robert Farrar Capon says in Hunting the Divine Fox--we would rather have a Superman messiah than the actual Suffering Servant we got.   Capon writes:

“We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.”

Our usual way of defining "good guys" is that they are the ones who punch the bad guys--you know, in order to make them stop being bad, I guess.  Our world understands that kind of power, and we tend to assume that it must be God's way of doing business as well.  We don't know what to do with a Good Guy--a genuine Good Human--whose way of being utterly and wholly good is to give up his life in suffering love for the "bad guys," the unrighteous... us. But that is the only Christ the New Testament is willing to give us: the righteous Jesus whose way of doling out justice is to lay down his life in love for the unjust, the unrighteous, and the wicked.

And maybe that's because we don't want to face the other truth that First Peter has to say to us:  that we are all villains.  We--not just people far away, in another country, or another continent--we are the bad guys.  We are, to use Pete's word for it, "the unjust," the "unrighteous."  You know... people who do bad stuff.  Bad guys.  Like the old Pogo cartoon put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

We have a way of making the Gospel into a Western--there's black hats and white hats, and those are the only choices.  And since I figure I'm not as bad as "those people" (insert your favorite stock character evildoer), I must be a good guy, right?  And what do good guys do to bad guys?  We fight 'em! 

But the New Testament doesn't allow for that illusion. It insists that every mother's son and every father's daughter is among the "unrighteous"--the stinkers, the sinners, the mess-ups, the people who do not practice justice and righteousness.  Because all of us are in that category.  We're the bad guys--the unjust.  The good news we call the Gospel is not that Jesus has come to recruit us to join his Justice League and to help him punch and zap "bad guys," but rather that Jesus' way of being just and good and righteous is to lay down his life... for the likes of us.

We can only stay in that childishly oversimplified world of "good guys are the ones who fight the bad guys" while it is play time.  Once we are ready to face the truth about ourselves, we'll have to acknowledge that we are not the heroes we like to think we are; we are the ones shouting "Crucify!"... and yet Jesus laid his life down precisely for us.

If we are going to dare to follow the way of Jesus, then, it will mean an overhaul of how we picture "good guys" and "bad guys" then.  And instead of assuming that I am in the category of "good guys," it will mean seeing ourselves as the ones for whom Jesus died, not as the ones doling out punches to the "bad guys."  For that matter, it will mean seeing that the way Jesus is good comes through suffering love--and love that is shown precisely who don't deserve it.

I will still smile when my son asks me to play superheroes with him, and I will be glad, too, when the heroes who inspire him, fictional or real, are people of character and courage as well as strength and speed.  But like another New Testament voice puts it, I know there will come a time for both of us to put away childish things as we follow the way of Jesus, and to learn that being "good," "righteous," and "just" like Jesus looks like laying our lives down for others, regardless of whether they are well-behaved or not.  That's the way Jesus is teaching us to be his kind of good.

Lord Jesus, as you gave your life away for us in all of our unrighteousness, lead us to love others and lay down our lives for others without regard for whether we think they deserve it or not.