2018: Good Friday

So, for anyone interested, Jim and I are still at it (check The Wild Turkey for details, especially the comments.) I’d like to reflect on a theme the two of us have been circling around, morality.

To with one hand lay a moral attack is to with the other affirm moral authority. Or as Jesus puts it, “. . . For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me. . .” (Mark 9:39) My drift: moral attacks bent on supporting a worldview which denies moral authority cannot be taken seriously. However, there’s a deeper direction I’d like to go with this.

The fact of morality, this intrinsic sense of good and bad, is saying something about the world. Morality itself is a ruler by which actions are judged, and this world is one where we are judged, not by others, not by ourselves, but by a law external and eternal. Whatever this says about any one particular religion, it certainly puts atheism upon shaky grounds, for it denies this judgement, an obvious corollary to morality. From this we can glean what might be a primitive vision of God, or some facet of the world that, while immaterial, is more concrete than all that we can taste, touch, or see.

The thing that everyone seems to miss about morality, or is distracted from, is that nothing passes the test. A few times I’ve prompted Jim to give me specifics, to tell me why the church is bad. This is perhaps easier than he thinks, for everything, including the church, has fallen short of perfection. So, on the purely binary conception of good or not good, black or white, nothing is good. That is part of the core of Christ’s death and resurrection.

See it yet? From the time you were born, yea even from the moment you were conceived, before you had done anything but exist, already you had fallen short. You were the inheritor of stolen lands, the product of rape, you were the progeny of lies, and the child of sin. But here, another aspect of the world shines through, something beyond the tallying of misbegotten deeds, love.

God, this God whose judgment we’ve feared, comes, but comes in the form of that newborn child, helpless and naked. He alone is good, alone perfect. He alone can face the judgment stored up for us. How can one be good? How can any of us escape the punishment of the moral law? Christ is the way, the pattern we’re to follow. Come to the cross.