HOW DO I BECOME A GOOD PERSON?
I have met a lot of good people in my life. How do I know? Because they often tell me they are. If I may explain. Every so often I happen to be in a conversation with someone I’ve never met before. If we are not meeting in a religious institution, the conversation periodically plays out this way.
Acquaintance: You from KC?
Me: No, I moved here because of my job.
Oh really, what do you do for a living?
I’m a pastor.
Oh [insert pause] I think I’m a pretty good person, and isn’t that the best any of us can do?
This knee-jerk reaction reveals a universal longing. We all want to be “good.” Part of the challenge, though, is that we all have our own frameworks of “good,” and some of that framework may be loosely connected to the Bible whether we call ourselves Christians or not. For example, many people define themselves as “good” as long as they haven’t broken the “big commandments” like: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not create a graven image to worship in your living room. “Nobody is perfect,” the thinking goes, “and we’ve all got our vices.” In this framework, surely God is an understanding fella who gets it. If there is a “hell,” he won’t send normal people there. That’s for the really “bad” people, and if you push too hard, you’re probably just judging, which Jesus said is a sign of being a “bad” person.
In other words, a good person means learning to follow the big rules well enough. It may be only a few rules, but rules are rules, nonetheless. The great irony is that this challenge rings relevant even for those who refuse any shared definition of what a good person is.
During an art exhibit, I struck up an intriguing conversation with an older woman. I used the word “should” for what reason I cannot remember now, but she replied, “Don’t should on me. There shouldn’t be shoulds anymore. I think the most loving thing is to let everyone define what is good for themselves.” Now, in some ways she is right. Wasn’t this what Jesus was undoing with the overly “should-ing” of the Pharisees?
And yet, here we are again. The stated premise of her argument was we should have a rule that we aren’t allowed to have rules. To throw off all “shoulds” is a “should” in itself (your head spinning yet?), which not only reveals an internal breakdown of logic, but it is also unlivable, as her statement reveals. We all have “shoulds” to some degree that we live by, and behind all of those “shoulds,” is a soul pining after living the good life.
Few questions have remained central to humanity quite like “What is a good person?” and “How do I become one?” and in a world longing to discover our truest selves, God longs for us to truly become our best selves. What is often remarkably overlooked in the claims of Christianity, even by some Christians, is the reality that Jesus has actually made a way for us to become better than “better.” Because of Jesus, we can become good.
Throughout history this journey of becoming has been described as the way of virtue. Aristotle and Plato were asking this very question about humanity long before the virgin Mary scandalously gave birth to Jesus in a cave. They were reaching but unable to grasp. They saw the shadow but couldn’t see the true form. This is because they didn’t know who we now know. They didn’t have Jesus, the riches of the gospel, and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Because Jesus is who Jesus is and because Jesus has done what only he could do in his life, death and resurrection, then Jesus not only invites us to become people of virtue, he does so in a way only he can.
There has been a resurgence of thoughtful biblical scholars who see the promise within Scripture for the regenerate believer in Jesus to grow progressively in goodness through the framework of virtue. If this were true, we’d expect change and growth in some of the people of the New Testament. We would expect Christians to become like Jesus, the ultimate good person. If we look, this is exactly what we find.
While there are examples of this across the New Testament, Peter, the historic chief apostle, stands out. Peter is the one who said he would never deny Jesus, but when the hour of trial comes, he fails. Peter hid and abandoned Jesus like everyone else. But then, this same Peter, as tradition has it, would become a man of untold courage and humility even unto a martyr’s death. When faced with his own crucifixion for being unwilling to renounce Jesus and his resurrection, he asked to be crucified upside down.
What happened?
In Peter’s second letter within Scripture, what many believe was written soon before his martyrdom, we see Peter’s framing of not merely how to follow the rules, but how to become a person like Jesus who more naturally keeps the rules. Peter never dismisses the rules, but he goes beyond them. Peter lays out the way of virtue. Specifically Peter writes, “For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness…” (2 Peter 1:5). The Greek word translated “goodness” could also be translated “virtue.” Like an upward and inward spiral staircase of practice and formation, we can, by the power of the Spirit, follow Jesus into the way of virtue.
But before we can step forward, we must remember. Correction: we must practice the discipline of remembering. This is more than recalling facts about the past, but this remembering is reconnecting our focus on a person who is indeed with us. We must remember the gospel, the Triune God at the center of the gospel, and that the good news really does mean we can become good people like Jesus.
Let’s make every effort to do just that together.
