Good, All the Way Down--July 6, 2021

Good, All the Way Down--July 6, 2021

"For the law appoints as high priests those who are subject to weakness, but the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever." [Hebrews 7:28]

It is devastating to lose a hero, not to death, but to disillusionment.

It is heartbreaking to have respected and looked up to someone, only to hear or see them later acting in ways that seem to contradict all that you had admired in them.

It is crushing to have placed your trust in someone and in their character, and then to have that trust lost and broken when they disappoint you, either by selling out to something reprehensible, or maybe by revealing they were never really worthy of your trust in the first place.

My goodness, even with fictional characters, it can be quite a blow to lose faith in someone you have been led to believe was good and noble.  I remember for myself feeling like I'd been punched in the gut to lose Atticus Finch as a hero, as I read the late Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman describing an old man Atticus who was as insidiously racist and bigoted in that later volume as the corrupt judicial system he had fought against when I read To Kill A Mockingbird in tenth-grade English class.  To have had this character built up as someone good, decent, and willing to risk his own position and privilege for the sake of someone targeted by systemic racism... and then to have a later window on this character in old age, who had somehow become the very thing I thought he had taught me to resist--well, that's a loss I am still feeling.  One of the things you hope for in literature is that the characters you get to know in one place will stay the same because their lives are bound up in between the covers of a book--and here, I felt like I lost one of the steady anchor points I had been leaning on since high school.

It happens regularly with the people we know in real life, too.  Folks we had looked up to, or thought of as honest, decent-hearted, compassionate people, sometimes reveal a streak of meanness, or crudeness, or casual hatred, and it makes you wonder how to deal with the contradiction.  Do these folks not see the disconnect between the parts of themselves that are noble and the parts that are rotten?  Do they think the rotten parts are actually good or--gasp--holy (like Pascal said, no one does evil so completely and cheerful as when it's done with religious conviction)?  Have they always thought and acted in bigoted or cruel ways and you had just never seen it before, or is it a new temptation they are wrestling with? For whatever else good or ill there is in this age of social media, one thing it certainly has done is to reveal a lot of the things we each assume everyone around us will like or agree with--and with every like, re-tweet, or share, we discover some pretty terrible things about the people around us that we just didn't know before.  And maybe each of us is revealing to others some pretty unsavory things about ourselves.  (The answer, of course, is not to just go back to hiding the terrible and hateful things inside us, but to change--to stop being terrible, hateful, self-centered, and crude.  But that's a conversation for another day.)

Well, if you know what it is like, then, to have lost faith in someone you had looked up to, who then let you down when they revealed something truly deplorable in their words or actions, then you can understand why it is such a big deal for the writer of Hebrews to see in Jesus someone who will not leave us disillusioned.  While every other religious professional--priests in the old levitical system of ancient Israel, to the megachurch pastor holding a gigantic rally and livestreaming it on the internet--will let us down in some way, Jesus won't.  He is the one who, as Hebrews puts it, "has been made perfect forever."

Look, I can't stop the way each of us is going to have to deal with erstwhile heroes who reveal something rotten about themselves in life.  I can do my best to work on myself, and to be both as openly honest with others and also to strive not to be a hateful, cruel, or self-centered person.  But I'm going to let you down, too, at some point.  If I haven't already disappointed you, don't you fret--wait long enough, I'll get around to letting you down, too.  That's why the solution the writer of Hebrews offers isn't to point to me.  The solution is not, and can never be, "Steve won't let you down!" anymore than it can be "Atticus Finch won't let you down!" or anybody else but Jesus.  

To be honest, the primary reason I find Jesus so compelling isn't the stories of miracles or healings, but that in the way of Jesus we find someone who is completely and authentically good, without ulterior motives, without a selfish angle, without a hidden streak of socially-acceptable bigotry just waiting to be found when you scratch the surface.  You never have to worry what terrible slogan Jesus will have slapped on the back of his truck on a bumper stickers.  You never have to worry about being caught off guard that Jesus will tell a racist joke or treat other people as less-than.  You never have to worry that Jesus will turn out to root for a "Me and My Group First" agenda and try to baptize selfishness as some kind of virtue.  He's good, all the way down.  And that's why I can't help but place my life in the hands of this same Jesus, to walk the way of Jesus and to be filled with the life of Jesus.  After being let down too many times by people near and dear to me, Jesus has shown himself to be different--like the old spiritual puts it, "he hasn't failed me yet."

Lord Jesus, thank you for your authentic goodness--enable us to rely on you today, and to be transformed in light of your perfect love.