14/11/2018: The Fruits of the Spirit—Goodness

When I was informed that our sermon series this term would be on “the fruits of the Spirit”, fruity as I am, I confess that I was dismayed to have been given the particular topic of goodness. I don’t feel qualified to tell you what is and isn’t good. In fact, I consider myself to be exceptionally naughty. Perhaps my one saving grace, in light of my persistent failure to quit smoking, is that the task of preaching on self-control has been left to someone else.

It’s true, I’m not qualified to tell you what is and isn’t good, and you should be deeply dubious of anybody who claims to be. But at the same time, goodness is something—however vaguely and imperfectly—that most of us usually strive for. Now when you’re a child, being “good” is a relatively straightforward affair because people constantly tell you in very material terms how to achieve it: “go to bed”, “put that down”, “spit that out” etcetera. Children have a very vivid sense of right and wrong, and are often heard wailing “it’s not fair”, partly for the simple reason that their naivety and reliance upon the care of adults does not afford them the agency to see very far beyond the present moment.

So, one of the most jarring things about growing up, and an aspect of being in your late teens which nobody warns us about, is the introduction into our lives of moral ambiguity. The mundane reality of independence may be that nobody will tick you off if you don’t clean your teeth. But it’s an altogether more challenging day if you are forced to confront the suggestion, perhaps, that painting that orphanage in Ghana the summer after A levels might not have been quite as altruistic as it felt at the time. Or perhaps that what you thought was kindness comes over as creepy and chauvinistic. Or perhaps what you thought was a compliment is othering and exoticising. Independence means not having somebody to foresee the consequences of your actions on your behalf. You will screw up, and in the darkness of these moments we find that sometimes good intentions are not enough. We still do damage, because it is only ever by our own metrics that we can “mean well”.

The desire to do good and “goodness” itself are not one and the same, because our desires are as much entangled with our power as our vulnerability. In today’s Gospel reading, Christ encounters ten of the most vulnerable people imaginable. Leprosy was not only a death sentence in the time of the Gospels, but cause for abject social stigmatisation. The ten come to Christ with the desire for a part of his goodness—to be healed—and goodness is what they get. But it is in gratitude for the desire already fulfilled, and with nothing more to gain, that the one Samaritan turns back to Christ and thanks him. All ten are healed, whether they are thankful or not, because everyone is deserving of Christ’s grace.

Perhaps, then, our goodness lies in the things that we do which we didn’t have to. The favours that we do, expecting nothing in return. But the fact still remains that sometimes our intentions are not enough. If we can only truly be good when there is nothing to be gained, that’s a problem, because actually there is always something to be gained. There is a pleasure in giving: when you kiss someone with their consent they kiss you back, and even the already-healed Samaritan gained a little more proximity to the heart of Christ in that moment of extra grace. We are desiring beings because we are broken; both power and vulnerability are part of our human condition, and while we allow children black-and-white morality because it’s as much as we can expect from them, the distinctively Christian idea that God himself became a human being is a daunting one indeed if we try to live up to his goodness.

But perhaps the flipside of “sometimes our intentions are not enough” could be that, for Christ, we are always enough. Not even good enough. Just enough. For Thomas Aquinas, goodness is inherent in all things, because all things are created by God. By this logic, evil lies at the heart of absence, but simply to exist is to partake of God’s goodness. All things are fallen and broken, to be sure, but not irreparably if refracted through the light of the Christ’s grace. At the beginning of this sermon, I facetiously referred to myself as a failure for not being able to quit smoking, but in the words of John Francis Friendship, “Christ on the cross was a failure”. His people were persecuted, he was betrayed, and with nobody but his mother and some anonymous women for company, he died. If you put Christ on a pedestal and see in him a paragon of unobtainable purity, I’m not sure how you can hope to get closer to him, much less to love as earthily as he did. In the end he was like you and me—fleshy, vulnerable, and broken—and it is by being broken again as bread that we envelop him into our own bodies in the Eucharist today.

Psalm 23, which we have just heard, is perhaps the most famous of them all. But I’d like to invite you to revisit it now with this idea of the embodied God in mind. The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is a familiar one, and here the Psalmist is traditionally understood to be invoking a metaphor for a caring God who leads his helpless flock to pastures green. But can the God who surpasses all understanding ever be caught in a metaphor? Our words and images may be “good intentions”, but to hold God up as a leader to be blindly followed is to alienate ourselves from the living, breathing, literally vital presence of his love. The Psalms may predate Christ, but they were an immutable part of his scripture. As Aviad M. Kleinberg writes in his remarkable book The Sensual God, “The God of sacred texts is often embarrassingly sensual: in the Talmud, God wriggles his toes to make thunder and takes human form to shave the king of Assyria. In the Old Testament, God wrestles with a man (and loses)”. Aviad’s right. The God of the Old Testament sighs, breathes life into our nostrils, walks through Eden, and wraps sinews around dry bones.

If you not only read but feel God in scripture, the words “thou art with me” glow with a radical new warmth. It is not for us to rationalise God, or to create rigid dogmas in his name. Take it from me, that way lies pain. On the contrary, our calling as Christians is to let God’s loving presence flow through our veins, just as it poured over into Christ at the incarnation, and is poured out as wine. For it is God who follows us when the psalmist writes “surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life”. 

The grace, goodness, and love of God are not unattainable goals, but with us always whether we like it or not, because the Trinitarian God is love itself. And, in the words of Bernard of Clairveaux, “if the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the Holy Spirit the kiss itself”. 

And so, may I speak in the name of the loving God: ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.