Recently I was going through the new Uncover resource with a Hindu friend. During the conversation he stated that ultimately all religions are the same, because all religions are trying to create good.
There was a sense in which I agreed with him. Yes, there is something about us as humanity which loves to try and distinguish between good/bad, clean/unclean, honourable/shameful. Often these become formalised into religious philosophies. There is something wonderfully uniting about humanity and its quest for the “good”: we set boundaries, create laws, promote some behaviours, outlaw others.
Yet – if there is any consensus about the “good”, we don’t seem to have found it. Perhaps in 1948 after the horrors of a Second World War there was some consensus, written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However the title is misleading: although it was written as a universal document it was not universally accepted. There has been much discussion about its Western bias, its incompatibility with Shariah law, and its focus on the individual over society.
And religions? Are they really all trying to create the good? I wanted to push back with my friend – “What about the child sacrifice to Molech?”
It was a deliberately provocative question. But it does begin to unearth a question that is lying underneath it all: “What is good?” And, within our multicultural society, how do we cope when our “goods” come into conflict with one another? So we are stuck. On the one hand we have this shared deep sense of the good, but on the other we cannot seem to be able to agree what that is.
I want to suggest rather than causing us to hold back for fear of giving offence, this area of the good is rather an exciting ground for engaging with our multicultural society. Not so that we can promote “British values” (whatever they are) but to point to the true good – God Himself.
In Mark 10 we encounter Jesus meeting the rich young ruler, who, we understand, has kept a large number of the commandments since he was a boy. He presents himself to Jesus – yet in this encounter we see Jesus take the desire for good and redefine it, starting with God.
“No one is good – except God alone”
Whatever the world might think about God, Jesus wants us to see that all goodness, all morality, is bound up in and defined by Him. There is not necessarily anything uniquely Christian about that claim; a number of theistic religions might say the same, that their god is good. However, as someone who represented his culture’s ideal of the good (rich, law-keeper) the young ruler was confident in his ability to gain eternal life. Yet Jesus uncovered him as someone who falls short of the true good – his heart was devoted to other things.
This is a huge shock to our religious systems and ideas of the good. Often I, like the rich young ruler, love drawing lines between good and bad in such a way that I find myself on the right side. We love being self-justifiers. I’ve always done just enough. I justify myself based on outward actions, not on inward desires. But Jesus redefines goodness to the point that it is impossible for a man to be good. It is like trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle. Leaving the disciples to exclaim: “Who then can be saved!?” And that’s where Jesus says these beautiful words: “All things are possible with God.”
This is where the Christian story is different. Whilst there may be some truth in the claim that we are all chasing after good, we ultimately descend into self-justifying. In the gospel we see THE good. In all His glorious beauty, so far out of our reach, yet who stoops down and washes our feet. In our quest for the good, let’s run to Him.
